Housing and Accommodation
Updated 1st May 2020
Students in all accommodation - whether student halls, private landlords, living with their family or in their own home - should not be disadvantaged by this crisis.
1. All students in UCB halls should not pay rent from 23rd March – the date lockdown was announced. PARTLY AGREED
2. All students who are currently in halls should get a guarantee that they can stay until this crisis is over. DONE
3. All students should be safe from eviction, and not have to pay rent for accommodation they cannot make use of.
What are we doing about it?
We're working with local Birmingham Students' Unions and the National Union of Students (NUS) to try and make a change with private accommodation providers - whether that's providers of student halls, or organisations that represent landlords across the country. We've signed up to NUS' demands for student renters and we're lobbying locally to ensure no student is evicted from their home during this crisis.
We are also communicating with the University regularly to ensure students currently living in University Halls are supported.
What can I do?
E-mail your MP, Shabana Mahmood, explaining the situation you're facing and asking for her support. If you click this link, there is a template email for you to get started with too.
Support the No Refund? No Return action started by students, which you can find more out about below.
Let us know if your accommodation provider is not allowing you to be released from your contract
Submit any different ideas and look at other students' ideas to vote up, down or comment on, to make sure we've got the greatest number of student voices involved.
What have we won to date?
After a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor on 3rd April, the University have announced that students are able to be released from their accommodation contracts at the Maltings and Cambrian Hall. For more information, please see our FAQ page here.
Following lobbying from our President, we've won concessions from Liberty and Unite to ensure that if students want to return home, they can be released from their contract and pay no further rent. If this applies to you, please check out our Coronavirus Housing pages for more information.
If you have a different student housing provider and they are refusing to release you from your contract, please let us know and we'll lobby on your behalf.
No Refund? No Return!
A number of students have started to say that if they get no refund, they won’t be returning to UCB student halls for the next academic year. This has been submitted as an idea on the website, which you can respond to here.
We've produced some campaign materials to support them, including an A4 poster you can print out and take a photo of yourself with and then post on social media, plus an instagram post that you can share in your story, tag other students in and fill out.
Download them and make use of them here:
A4 No Refund No Return poster
Instagram No Refund No Return frame
Be sure to tag the Guild so we can collect your feedback, and use the hashtag #supportourstudents.