UCL's Striking Students Are Leading the Fight Against London's Exploitative Rents

This week, 150 students at University College London went on "indefinite rent strike", so far withholding an estimated £250,000 worth of rent. The students claim that the university is engaging in "flagrant profiteering" by charging eye-watering rents to live in its halls.

The students point out that the average rent for student halls at UCL has increased by 56 per cent since 2009, and that the profit the university has made year-on-year has increased during this period. Further back, the figures in UCL's annual accounts show that the profit made on student halls has increased as much twelvefold over the past 15 years. While rents have been hiked, government support for students has remained stagnant, and in July it was announced that grants for poorer students are being cut. According to UCL's Cut the Rent campaign: "Students are pushed deeper into debt and poverty, with many unable to focus on their studies due to the necessity of insecure, part-time work."

This is the second time students at UCL have refused to pay rent. Last year the college ended up paying out around £300,000 in compensation to students over poor living conditions, which, according to the students, meant rat-infested kitchens and noise from university building work that regularly reached 95 decibels – a level high enough to cause hearing damage.

This time around, students aren't complaining about specific living conditions, but that the rent is too damn high. Anabel Bennett, a third-year chemistry student and one of the organisers of the strike at UCL, explains: "From speaking to people,they generally don't care too much about the conditions. The cockroaches and stuff are still there… but most people I speak to don't mind living in shitty accommodation as long as it's cheap. The issue is that none of it's cheap. We're angry because we're clearly being exploited by the university. Rent is going up at a much higher rate than the student loan is going up."

The strike affects two halls of residence near UCL's Bloomsbury campus, Ramsey Hall and Max Rayne House, where some students are paying up to £262 a week for a room; however, the organisers want to expand the strike to as many halls as possible in the future. "Already, as a result of this rent strike, we have been contacted out of the blue by other students at other halls who have said 'hey! We want to do this as well!' Next term we're going to escalate to other halls," Anabel says.

Maybe you could see this as part of a rounded education, and maybe London unis are just doing their best to prepare their students for the state of the rental market once they leave halls – a market in which it's acceptable to put a shed in your kitchen and charge someone £530 to sleep in it. But the striking students think their actions could resonate beyond their halls, too. "The idea is that we do this in student halls first… then we want to see if this can be replicated in the private sector," says Anabel. "We want to show that this can work, that we can win. Obviously that's a long way down the line, but it's a long-term aim of the campaign."

"The university seems to have this oblivious attitude of how people will pay, that this is part of the reality of living in London," she continues. "It's extremely difficult to pay the way yourself. Most of the people in Max Rayne I spoke to will have one part-time job, some will have two part-time jobs. There's a guy I know who had two part-time jobs and he was looking for a third."

Delve into the dusty archives of student newspapers and the differences between then and now become obvious. Up until the 1950s, for example, the University of London (of which UCL is a part) had an entire office devoted to regulating private rental accommodation for students. University staff would make trips around London inspecting "digs" and taking action against any landlord not taking proper care of University of London students. But universities will always reflect society, and times have changed. The matronly finger-wagging bureaucrat university of the post-war period has given way to the university as a profiteering landlord of the 21st century.

It's not hard to see why and how this has happened. Universities, along with other former public services – the NHS, social services and schools – have been compelled by successive governments to liberate themselves from the shackles of state bureaucracy and join the free market, and begin viewing themselves as retailers with customers as opposed to academies with students.

At the same time, universities have grown in economic importance, as the British economy has moved largely from industry to services. Educational "exports" are now worth £17billion a year to the UK economy and will grow to £20billion a year by 2018, estimates the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). "There are few sectors of the UK economy with the capacity to grow and generate export earnings as impressive as education," former head of BIS, David Willetts, said in 2013. Universities are big business now, and the way they're talked about by government and university bosses, you might forget that the thing underpinning it all is education and learning. In this environment, making a profit from students doesn't seem so out of place.

The UCL rent strike is asking questions common to any student activist around since the wave of protests in 2010: what is the university for and who is it for? Supposedly, the business model many universities now claim to subscribe to puts their students, or 'customers', in control. If a university provides a bad service, the argument goes, students will move elsewhere.

But as students everywhere are discovering, this doesn't actually work. Once you're at a university, you're stuck there for three years or more – it is not at all easy to leave and go elsewhere, and universities know this. Increasing amounts of time and money are spent on marketing universities to potential students, but once they've enrolled, these students are milked for all they're worth. The UCL rent strike is just one example of students standing up and calling bullshit on the new operating practices of universities, highlighting that being a student in Britain, and especially London, is increasingly precarious and difficult. Given that the pressures facing students are also common to renters outside of the university system, it seems possible that strikes like this could act as a precursor to wider housing action around the UK.

@owebb

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