Uni housing havoc: ‘It is extremely difficult to find student housing that does not try to scam you’

Written by Tyler Nicholas

Credit: Sulets

Students living in Leicester are completely outraged by the overpriced student housing and the lack of support offered to them throughout the pandemic. Each year, the average student is supplied with one to eight thousand pounds in maintenance loan from Student Finance England, which is divided termly to cover their living expenses and their food costs.

University of Leicester students roughly get around six to seven thousand, four hundred a year on average.

With the student accommodation prices going up each year and the average studio prices starting from one-hundred and forty pounds a week for fifty-two weeks (totalling around seven-thousand two-hundred pounds), it leaves them with no money or very little money for a years supply of food.

Students have complained that poor living conditions included, cramped bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens, broken toasters, cheap washing machines that barely wash your clothes, the fridge/freezer that can only fit one container, mould in the bathrooms and faulty light-switches.

This money-grabbing scheme for landlords to manipulate students into renting unsanitary properties, simply because there is no other choice, has angered students, not only in Leicester but across the UK.

Lucy Collins, a student from University of Nottingham said: "I am disappointed. They're just trying to squeeze out any bit of money they can from students who have none, and I think that shows what kind of people they are.”

Another student from Loughborough said:"it is extremely difficult to find student housing that does not try to scam you."

This is because he had to pay almost three times his usual gas and electric bill at a student house, totalling from an affordable fifty-eight pounds to a whopping two-hundred and ninety-five pounds.

Many students in Leicester have been calling for a rent rebate, in hopes that the landlords can make a change in regards to the treatment of University students.

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