Beaver
Issue 845 | 19.1.16
the
Newspaper of the LSE Students’ Union
Students Propose Rent Strike For 10% Cheaper Halls Ellen Wilkie Executive Editor TWO THIRD YEAR LONDON School of Economics (LSE) students have proposed that students in halls begin a rent strike, in hopes of decreasing the cost of living in halls by 10%. Josh Hitchens and Rayhan Uddin believe that the cost of living at LSE is too high and that expensive hall rents are a large contributor to that. In response to the high rents they are proposing that students withhold payment when the next hall rent instalment is due at the beginning of the summer term. In a statement to The Beaver, Hitchens and Uddin explained that ‘At present, the majority of Rooms in LSE halls cost in excess of £200 a week. At a time when student loan levels haven’t risen with inflation and maintenance grants are likely to be scrapped, this is unacceptable. The school leadership is making an LSE education unaffordable and exploiting a monopoly on freshers accommodation for financial gain. Unfortunately SU negotiations with the school on this matter have been extremely difficult and confined solely to trying to achieve a rent freeze. Even this is proving to be a battle. We are proposing this motion because we feel a rent freeze doesn’t address the underlying problem, that halls rent is already totally unaffordable for many students. We also want to give the SU a stronger negotiating hand with the school. Our motion with therefore propose that no rent is paid to the LSE until they commit to a ten percent decrease in rent across all LSE residences. Even after this is achieved we will still have some of the highest halls rents in the country so we be-
lieve that this is a reasonable and achievable reduction in rents to demand.’ Nona Buckley-Irvine, LSESU General Secretary, is of the opinion that ‘Rents are unaffordable and it goes without saying that a freeze would not go far enough, which is why we have successfully lobbied LSE to adopt an affordable rents strategy into their residential strategy. However, we have to start by influencing decisions being made with respect to rents, and the looming decision is about whether to increase rents by 2.5 % at finance committee on 28th January, after we successfully delayed the decision being taken to increase them. LSE has yet to prove that it is committed to minimising the cost of living for students living in halls and so if by summer term they have failed to commit to a genuine strategy, similar to Kings College London, then I would fully support more drastic action being taken, if that is what students living in halls want to do.’ A third year student made the criticism that ‘The proposed strike makes a mockery of student contracts with halls. Students have signed a legally binding agreement which if broken could lead to possible eviction. This proposal could pose huge problems for students who may not know the dangers of not paying their rent’. The disparity between rent prices in London and the rest of the UK is drastic, as the pair point out, but a Beaver report published late last academic year proves that LSE hall rent costs are competitive relative to other University of London halls. Last year, the average cost to an LSE student for halls was £6702, whereas comparable University of London halls cost £8257 and private halls of residence cost £11,208.
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MY OPINION ABOUT LSE was very high, so I was surprised about the student satisfaction ranking of The Times, where LSE ranked low. During the Welcome Week, we were told to raise our voices whenever we were unhappy, since we pay a lot of money. Furthermore, the LSE Ethics Code was presented to us. One part of it deals with Integrity. There, the first bullet point of it is being ‘honest and truthful’. As an LSE student living in Lilian Knowles House, I am utterly disappointed by the information provided by LSE Residential Services in this regard. Before confirming the offer to live at Lilian Knowles, I checked all the relevant information provided by both LSE and Sanctuary Students. Everything looked very promising: the distance to campus, laundry on site, a computer room, the area, the building itself, and even the rent. With these expectations, I arrived here and was heavily disappointed within the first few days and became deeply frustrated within months. First, the walking distance to LSE is 45 minutes and not ‘about 30 minutes’ as LSE Residential Services claimed. Second, there is not a construction site ‘nearby’, as LSE Residential Services wrote. Neither is there a ‘possibility of noise disruption’. What I face is a major construction site opposite the student accommodation with heavy noise disruption being a reality from 8am onwards every... Continued on Page 8