Renters’ Rights Bill

Debate between Baroness Wolf of Dulwich and Lord Willetts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 40 in my name. This is the moment when students and higher education enter the housing and rental market debate. I am never totally sure whether the department responsible for housing welcomes this interruption from the higher education sector, but I hope the Minister will accept it in the spirit in which it is meant. I declare an interest as a visiting professor at King’s College London, and a member of the council of the University of Southampton.

I understand the arguments that the Minister makes about the need for tenants to have security and be able to put down roots in the long term, but so many of her arguments for this legislation do not apply to students who are seeking reliable accommodation for an academic year. The model that she proposes is clearly not in their interests.

If I may say so to the Minister, the link between housing policies and higher education is very important. The previous Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, set a target of 50% of people going to university. There are different views about the target; I do not personally believe in targets, but nevertheless that 50% target was achieved and it was achieved only because of the use of the private rented sector. It is impossible to have imagined that that target would have been secured without the way in which the private rented sector has developed for student accommodation. This is not just a historic achievement; if the Government have opportunity as one of their core objectives, it is surely important that students who could benefit from higher education have that opportunity, and that includes being able to access accommodation that meets their needs.

The Government have clearly accepted that there is a need for some special arrangements for student lets. The exact form they take is open for discussion. My noble friend Lady Scott made very powerful points in support of her proposed amendments, which try to secure that. The Government have made some concessions to recognise the student market. There is already one exemption from the legislation, which is for purpose-built student accommodation. That tends to be high-cost and involves students making a very early commitment. It is possible almost at the beginning of the previous academic year for the student to enter into a special academic year contract in this high-cost, purpose-built accommodation. To put it crudely, the Government are looking after the elite: the students who plan a year ahead, can afford the high rents and go into the —by and large—very high-quality purpose-built accommodation, which often has business investors behind it.

There is now a second category that has been added, and that is ground 4A, which is essentially for HMOs with three bedrooms or more in the private rented sector. They are also now going to be exempt from the burden of the legislation, with a different start date for making a commitment—about January before the academic year starts. That is the next group— I feel it is a bit like that famous “three classes” sketch, since we have got a second group that will now be looked after.

But that leaves a third group for whom the Government are not currently providing any exemption. These are students in smaller accommodation, maybe one or two-bedroom properties, for whom none of the special exemptions are going to apply. It is therefore very odd that, in the Government’s model to tackle this problem, you could have three university students who are friends and are in three totally different rental regimes because of the structure of the exemptions which the Government are trying to offer.

What I am attempting in the amendment in my name—I welcome the support of other noble Lords—is to say that these smaller rented accommodations of one or two bedrooms should also be exempt from the general provisions of the Bill and instead be recognised as academic accommodation, with its special needs. What do we know about these students in one- or two-bedroom properties? The evidence is limited. There seem to be quite a few of them. There are different estimates as to how many students in the rented sector are in these smaller accommodations. One estimate is 24%; another is a third. Several hundred thousand students are currently in this sector. So, if landlords pull out from it because there is no way they can be confident of being able to offer a tenancy for an academic year and the accommodation enters the mainstream market, several hundred thousand students currently renting in this sector will lose out.

One view is that they may be students who go for particularly low rents. I do not know. An alternative account of these students is that this smaller accommodation is basically for students who wish to live more quietly. It is less social. One suggestion is that it tends to be final-year students who move out from the bigger, more crowded accommodation so that they can properly study and revise for their final year. The Government’s education policy appears to be, “It is okay to have a special arrangement if you are going to be in a large, sociable environment, but if you want to move into a studious, quieter environment, we are ceasing to recognise that you are a special student and your kind of accommodation is going to go”.

I very much hope that the Minister will recognise, as the Government have already made concessions, that we need a wholehearted attempt to preserve an academic year student rental market. My attempt to extend the exemption on ground 4A to one- and two-bedroom accommodation is an attempt to do that. The interesting proposals from my noble friend Lady Scott are an ingenious attempt to do that.

Finally, and briefly, I will refer to another amendment that attempts to do that: Amendment 189, in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who is in the Chamber but currently appears unable to participate in this consideration of his excellent amendment. It is another attempt to resolve this issue with an ingenious proposal that there should be a special code of conduct for private sector residential landlords letting to students. If landlords sign up to that code of conduct, they would then be exempt.

To be honest with the Minister, I do not have particularly strong views about exactly which mechanism should be used but I hope that at the end of the consideration of these amendments, she will accept that there needs to be a wholehearted recognition that the student academic market is different and, instead of slicing it into these particular sectors—some parts of it to be recognised and others not to be—there needs to be a complete solution for students renting for academic terms because, otherwise, the Government’s commitment to opportunity will be in jeopardy.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I have added my name to Amendment 40 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and declare an interest as an academic employee of King’s College London. As such, I am acutely aware of the accommodation and living costs that students face if they study away from home. London is particularly expensive, as I am sure noble Lords have noticed, and the level of maintenance loans available and the total absence in England of maintenance grants mean that many UK students conclude that a London degree is simply out of reach.

At King’s, we manage to offer first-year undergraduates a place in hall and we have an affordable accommodation scheme that helps a subset of students obtain accommodation at below market rates, and other universities are similar. However, over time we have seen our student body change. On the one hand, we have far more international students, many of whom are able to afford the rents charged in high-end, purpose-built student accommodation or to pay market rents in the private sector; on the other hand—this is far less well known—we have seen a strong growth in the proportion of our UK students whose families live in or close to London who live at home, and a corresponding decline in the number of UK students who are in student accommodation in London.

If your family lives in the London area, you can live at home and be a commuter student and still have access to a huge range of institutions and degrees, but that is not true for people in a very large part of the country. You do not need to believe that young undergraduates should all go away to do their studies to be aware that for many people, it is absolutely central to social mobility and to their future. If it is only wealthy students who can move geographically, our best faculties and specialist degrees will not be able to recruit the best students.

Higher Education (Fee Limits and Fee Limit Condition) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2025

Debate between Baroness Wolf of Dulwich and Lord Willetts

Monday 3rd March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this measure. I should declare my interests as a visiting professor at King’s College London and a member of the University of Southampton’s council. I know from seeing universities close up that the situation is indeed serious, as the Minister rightly said. The freeze in the level of fees has meant a 28% cut in the real resource available for universities in the last seven years. This cannot carry on, so I support this measure.

Having heard the Minister’s arguments about the need to strengthen universities’ financial position, I would add that it is a pity that the entire extra revenues for universities from this measure go in meeting the national insurance costs that they face. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us, in her winding-up speech, her estimate of the extra expenditure on national insurance for universities as compared to the extra receipts from these higher fees. What I conclude from this is that, if the Minister is to live up to the excellent rhetoric about putting universities on a sounder financial footing, she will need to go further in future. I hope that, in her response, she can give some indication of her plans for the future. I would encourage the Minister to carry on with indexation as an absolute minimum—after all, that is what the Blair Government did, automatically indexing fees year after year—because, otherwise, the problem that she described so eloquently will just continue to get worse.

A range of us have, in different ways, tried to find an alternative system for funding higher education. Employers will not put up any more, and the Treasury and the taxpayers are not going to put up any more either. So we all end up reluctantly concluding that this is the only game in town. All three political parties represented in the Committee today have concluded that you have to put up fees in order to sustain our higher education system—and that is the case.

We could all learn a lot from my noble friend Lord Johnson, who introduced the TEF. Clear pressure to raise the quality of teaching is an important part of any future increase. Personally, instead of the rather random process of an Augar review or a freeze, I always wanted to see a quinquennial review—a review every five years—modelled to some extent on the way in which the social security system operates, from which we can always learn. A quinquennial review would enable a judgment to be made about the right level of the repayment threshold and the right level of fees, in the light of what had happened to earnings and the cost of higher education, and it could set out a formula that lasted for the life of a Parliament.

I will not comment on foundation years. I recognise the political and popular anxieties about measures such as this. Such measures never poll well, but the reason for that is often a misunderstanding. A lot of people still think that students have to pay up front, and a lot of people, including parents, think that the debt is like a credit card debt or an overdraft, meaning that, if their child has a £50,000 debt, they can take out £50,000 less as a mortgage. Those are misconceptions. The fundamental case for these measures is that they are in the best interests of students. Students will have a well-financed and well-funded higher education and, as the Minister rightly explained, will pay back only on a repayment formula that is not changed by these measures.

Finally, I urge that, now that the Government are operating with a model that they themselves were crucial in designing, the Minister and the Government own it. All three parties have a shared interest in trying to communicate the reality of this system. If ever we lapse into saying that the fees should not go up because there is a cost of living crisis, that feeds misunderstanding and is extremely irresponsible.

I hope that the Minister will be able to spare the time for a meeting where we could go through the painful lessons I have learned about how one tries to communicate the reality of the system. I also hope that she might consider a more strategic approach, so that universities know that the real resource they have will at least be protected in the years to come.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I also must declare an interest, as a member of the academic staff of King’s College London. I would also like to note that I was a member of the Augar review. Apropos of the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, of a quinquennial review, I am rather pleased that it has taken only six years since the final report of the Augar review to get to some of the implementation of it.

Obviously, I welcome the Government’s decision finally to raise fees a little, but I would like to say something about foundation years. As the Government’s memorandum points out, this came out of the Augar review’s recommendation: basically, foundation years should go, except in a few specific high-skill and very important subjects, such as medicine. It is worth noting that, although the Government—indeed, their predecessor was in a similar position—decided not to go that far, as has been pointed out,

“there is little evidence that studying a foundation year is always necessary for students wishing to access an undergraduate course in these subjects, and potential foundation year students can choose functionally similar courses—such as Access to HE diplomas—that cost significantly less”—

or, as in the case of A-level resits, cost them nothing at all.

Although I very much welcome the decision to reduce the level of fees on classroom-based foundation years, I recollect for the record that when we first looked at them on the Augar committee, nobody had really noticed, including us. It was pointed out to us by the FE principal member of our committee, Bev Robinson, who basically said, “Do you realise what’s happening?”. She also noted—I cannot tell how widespread this was—that she had come across some very aggressive recruiting by universities of young people who, in her view, would have been much better off either doing access to HE or retaking their A-levels.

I underline that the Government recognise this, and that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee also noted:

“While we welcome attempts to encourage under-represented groups into HE, we would be concerned if these came at the expense of poor value for money for those students and for taxpayers”.


The consultation process resulted in a small majority of people saying that they did not want the fees to go up. However, the majority of non-higher education provider respondents definitely wanted the fees to go down. That is where we are.

My view is that there is still a question mark over these years. I thank the Minister for cutting the fees for foundation years in classroom-based subjects, but can she assure us that the Government will continue to monitor enrolments to see whether that does in fact put an end to the enormous growth that there has been? Will she consider asking the department to study the impact of foundation-year study on young people who go by that route, and how successful they are? It is very easy to forget about it again, and it crept up on everybody unawares—and I think everyone is agreed that it is a good thing that we are taking some action.