Money Flushed Away: Reduce Hall Fees

We finally decided to facilitate many students including RAs and other involved students to take direct action around hall fees. We helped them run a large cross campus campaign to show the university the strength of feeling from students on the issue. There was a period of door-knocking for two weeks followed by a day of action. There were many media outlets at the day of action and a petition was presented to the VC by Mark Harrop President of Aitken Wing and Victoria Barber President of Mason Hall. The petition had over 2000 names on it and we had around 150 people on the march to support the campaign. It was a massive success in terms of activism and we engaged many students in direct action, the likes of which, the Guild has not seen in many years.

The outcomes of this led the university to take the four demands on the petition more seriously. The Guild has held meetings with the university and we have received commitments on some of the demands. The decision about Chamberlain is too far away for us to influence any university decision on the matter but they will take our concerns into account when it comes. The point about nominations agreements and the key criteria being cost has proved slightly irrelevant because of the lack of realistic alternatives to Liberty Living halls. However we have had a commitment to a benchmarking exercise with the university to ascertain where the university in terms of price of halls of residence fees. When this shows the university towards the top of the pile they have committed to change the status quo as we asked and reduce hall fees. HAS have also committed to establishing some model of accommodation bursary to help students, which would be advertised at the time of application. We will continue to push hard on this issue into the future.