How will the rent increase impact us?
Category
Officer Trustees
Date
04 dec 2024
Author
Union President
Read Time
5 min
Imperial is raising rents. We need your help to do something about it!
Imperial owns and operates its first-year student halls. Around 80% of first-year undergraduates reside in these halls and the university sets the rents for them.
From January to October 2024, Imperial conducted a residential review of its first-year accommodation, and committed to a three-tiered rent-setting approach:
• Tier 1: Rents at London Affordable Rent levels for students with financial needs.
• Tier 2: Intermediate rents below London competitors.
• Tier 3: Rents at 10% discount to market prices.
The review had in attendance members of the Union (myself included), wardens, senior academics, and members of the university’s property, finance and student services teams.
On October 29th, Nico (your Deputy President for Welfare) and I sat down with the university’s rent negotiations team and were presented with an initial proposal for first-year hall rents increases: an average increase of 30% across the portfolio relative to 2024/25.
We believe this is strictly unacceptable.
Imperial prides itself on ‘breaking even’ on halls. This means only charging enough rent to cover capital and operational costs associated with running the halls. With that in mind, we asked to see the costs they were budgeting for.
On November 15th, the university agreed to share with us the costs budgeted for 2024/25 and 2025/26 as well as the cost increases year-on-year.
Given the impact we feel rent increases would have, Nico and I have deprioritised other projects without the time sensitivity and redirected our efforts to critical analysis of the costs associated with halls, and lobbying for a considerable reduction in the proposed rents for 2025/26.
What have we been busy negotiating about?
- Decarbonisation. The university was prepared to charge £1.2m to student rents to put towards the decarbonisation of the residential building. We were firm that the commitment to net zero by 2040 is one Imperial has signed up to. The responsibility to pay for it lies with Imperial, not with first-year students. Imperial removed these costs for 2025/26 but is not committing to keeping them out.
- Wardening. Imperial offers free accommodation to a subset of staff and PhD students in return for them providing pastoral support to those in halls. This pastoral support can be critical to the halls community and something students really value. But why is Imperial charging £1.19m to first-year rents to cover the ‘opportunity cost’ of the space the wardens occupy in halls? No good answer, so we managed to get this cost removed.
- Smaller things but it all adds up. We’ve argued a reduction in staff costs of £180k (reduced from a 12% increase to 2% relative to 2024/25). We’ve also asserted that costs should be apportioned for the time students spend in halls: no, students shouldn’t be paying for building insurance, Wi-Fi and cleaning costs for the whole year when they only spend 39/52 weeks residing in the building. We queried why the water bill was expected to inflate by 33% and it was subsequently reduced to a 5% increase.
In short:
October 29th: we were presented with 30% average increase to rents.
November 29th: negotiations mean we now face 16% average increase to rents.
Although we’ve managed to negotiate 14% off, that just isn’t enough. And now, we need your help.
We need the student body to make some noise. The student body comes first.
If there are no students, there is no Imperial.
If you have the brains, the desire and the drive to secure yourself an Imperial offer, the price of its student halls should not stop you joining the Imperial community.
It also affects your time while you’re studying here too – the private rental sector also looks at how universities market their prices and will adjust accordingly.
We know that the cost-of-living that comes with studying in London is significant – it’s time Imperial recognises this too and chooses to act in favour of the student experience when it comes to rents.
- How would a rent increase affect you?
- Could you have studied at Imperial with halls prices 16% more expensive?
- Can you afford more expensive private accommodation?
And don’t just tell us: tell your personal tutors, your halls wardens, your teachers and your mates. We really need you to make some noise and help us demonstrate that the student community doesn’t stand for this. Decisions will be made in January, so now is the time to act.
Fill out the rent increase impact survey today and let us know what you think.