Halls rent campaign
| This year has seen the conclusion of a long and hard fought halls rent campaign which began in October 2007. It is a perfect example of how MMUnion can bring about real change on the most critical issues and affect students' lives positively. |
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The Union Advice Centre gives assistance to people with debt, funding and housing issues and also keeps a watch on trends that arise from problems presented to them. In this case they began to notice complaints from students in halls of residence that they didn’t have enough money because MMU took half the year's rent in the students’ first payment.
This payment was often more than the total amount of loan money students received, which plunged them immediately into debt, as they were forced to use up over half of their overdraft in week 1. The Advice Centre staff told the elected officers about the number of complaints of financial hardship caused by MMU taking so much rent up front and the officers decided to change it.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Initially the University was cold towards the hardship incurred by students as a result of their rent policy. MMU were reluctant to have an open discussion, arguing that many students don’t pay what they owe leaving MMU with a heavy debt.
We still believed this practice was wrong as, ultimately, it penalised those students who did pay their rent, making them, in effect, pay for those students who were in arrears. It was indiscriminate and made the first few weeks at uni, which should be fun and exciting, miserable for many.
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We visited and spoke to over 150 students in 3 different halls of residence in Didsbury, Crewe and Manchester to find out what they thought and to determine the extent of the problem. We asked what particular aspect of living at an MMU hall was the most difficult and, unsurprisingly, it was the payment structure.Many students felt very passionate about the issue and confirmed the initial reports raised with the Advice Centre. In short, what you told us was that it was very damaging to life at MMU and that many people felt forced to consider leaving university completely.
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We also met with various university staff and decion makers to find out why this situation existed at MMU when so few other universities who faced the same problems took this approach.
The result was a discussion paper, which was presented to the University Directorate, and which argued strongly that the university was making the first few weeks of life at MMU much more difficult than it needed to be. The paper was well received and we were asked to work with MMU to find a way to protect the university’s financial position while eliminating the hardship caused to students in term 1.
MMU suggested an amended rent weighting of 40% in terms 1&2 and 20% in term 3. We felt this would not really help students as the shift in emphasis was not great enough. We continued to hold to our position of a more even weighting of 3 payments across the year. After several discussions at meetings at MMU it was eventually agreed that the rent instalments would be weighted at 35% in September, 35% in January and 30% in April. We estimate this has moved about £1.5 million of student expenditure from the most expensive first term into term 2 and has made the initial period of university life less stressful.
Click
here to download the discussion paper presented to MMU directorate.