Living away from home is becoming less and less affordable

NUS and Unipol’s semi-regular student accommodation survey has long argued that it means the total contract price should be 55 per cent of the maximum student loan or lower.

That seems perfectly reasonable – notwithstanding the fact that plenty of campus accommodation has been aimed squarely at “lucrative” international students.

What we don’t have is consistently reliable data on how many rooms hit the definition. But now Generation Rent have some data – and they reckon only one in six on-campus rooms are affordable for students.

To reach that conclusion, it has analysed 49,161 university-operated (or fronted) rooms across the UK at nine universities – University College London, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leeds, Warwick University, Manchester University, Nottingham University, the University of Edinburgh, Cardiff University and Queen’s University Belfast.

Accommodation included rooms with shared facilities, ensuite rooms, and self-catered and catered offerings. It did not include larger-scale rooms such as studios and family suites.

It was also assumed that students would be studying in the country they received their student loan from, so English students received an English student loan and Scottish students a Scottish loan.

That’s generous of them – especially since NUS and Unipol really ought be amending its definition given that via frozen family income thresholds, the amount a student can borrow in student loans is reducing every year in England, Wales and NI as wages grow.

Private PBSA – which is rarely developed at the cheap end of things – is usually more expensive. And HMO rents are still rising fast too.

The PBSA problem is acute in London – if the loan isn’t increasing by inflation, developers that are held to minimum percentages of rooms in new builds via the London Plan are increasingly complaining that the rule is choking new supply.

It’s all pretty bleak stuff. Living away from home is becoming increasingly unaffordable. That might be fine in the long term if you think the UK should wean itself off the boarding school model – but we’re also seeing a drop off in subject diversity ion plenty of squeezed universities, and it’s not as if our public transport system is especially amenable to a larger group of “regional” commuters.

What’s that you say? A wicked problem that needs joined-up attention from the education, transport and housing departments? It’s the hope that kills you.