Andrea Bidnic, Adnan Bader and Rebekah Wright
Every year, thousands of bright-eyed new students take the obligatory pre-university trip to IKEA to gather a collection of pots, pans, bed sheets and maybe even a tin opener. For many students, life in halls is an iconic and exciting part of their university experience. Whilst flatcest, midnight fire alarms and the four loaves of mouldy bread left by your anonymous flatmate might be part and parcel of staying in university accommodation, having your laptop stolen from your room certainly shouldn’t be.
However, The Cheese Grater has received multiple testimonies from students describing security deficiencies in UCL halls, highlighting the ubiquity of insecure infrastructure, a disorganised security system and insufficient responses to repeated complaints.
Students should be able to expect that the extortionate rent they pay to live in London halls will at least cover very basic security, especially when one considers the relatively high crime rates in the capital. Yet a resident of Ifor Evans during the 2021-22 academic year told The Cheese Grater that on her first day in halls, she discovered that the lock on her door was broken. If she shut the door completely, she would be locked in her flat.
After being unable to close her door for a month someone was sent to repair it. One would expect such a problem to be easily fixed, but instead the Ifor Evans resident stated: ‘For about five weeks after [the repair team came] my door didn’t lock because the way they fixed the problem was by taking away the lock’.
The lack of haste in fixing such a glaring security concern suggests very little care about the safety of our Ifor informant and her belongings on the part of UCL accommodation security. The Ifor Resident recalled that: ‘The front gate was probably only locked about 50% of the time, and the front door into the building was never locked ever’
In one telling anecdote, the resident returned to Ifor Evans at 4:30am, having forgotten her key. She recalled her predicament, stating: ‘I was like “Oh my God! I’m gonna have to stay out until someone lets me in!” But then, the front gate was open, the front door was open, and my door wasn’t locked so I ended up just being able to walk in on my own to my room without a key’
The Ifor Evans resident also bemoaned UCL’s lacklustre response to her issues. She explained that when she questioned the lack of security at her halls ‘someone turned up in [her] room and said “Oh hey, I’m here some nights”, introduced himself, gave me his personal phone number. It wasn’t like a security phone number, it was this guy’s phone number.’
‘If someone knew where I lived, there wasn’t anything stopping them from just walking in or sharing the information’, the resident concluded. ‘It wasn’t very safe and I was quite frustrated’. Clearly, despite the almost laughable condition of security in Ifor Evans, the possible consequences for the resident we spoke to, and the 307 other students that lived there, were seriously unsettling and potentially dangerous.
Unfortunately, Ifor Evans is not the only hall suffering from an acute case of lax security measures. A resident of John Tovell House, who lived in the Gower Street accommodation between September 2022 and June 2023, told The Cheese Grater that on 15th January 2023, one of his flatmates had been the victim of a robbery.
One may quite sensibly assume the robbery occurred whilst the victim was valiantly meandering the mean streets of Bloomsbury for the day, or even when they had gone home for the weekend. But no.
The victim of the robbery had simply left their room to use the toilet within the same building. The flatmate of the student who was robbed explained to us that the victim ‘hadn’t been gone for more than ten minutes’. It’s astounding that the state of security at John Tovell is so terrible that going to the bathroom has become a risk factor for your most treasured possessions getting nicked.
Unsurprisingly, the burglar didn’t dramatically smash through a window or abseil down into the room Mission Impossible-style – they simply walked in through the front door. ‘Unless you really slam it shut, consciously behind you, then it stays open’, the John Tovell resident affirmed. He went on to explain that multiple accommodation doors along Gower Street don’t close properly, including the one at Arthur Tattersall House.
Seemingly, UCL accommodation doesn’t understand that an ‘open door policy’ would involve being able to drop into the Provost’s office at any time, and not ‘Room 6, Flat 2, Floor 3, *Insert UCL hall of choice here*’ which belongs to your mysterious flatmate who you’ve only seen once when they microwaved a sandwich.
The victim had ‘two laptops nicked and some headphones, I believe’, the flatmate told us. Obviously, these items are massively valuable and whilst (we live in hope that) UCL Accommodation was not the perpetrator of this crime, their inability to provide a working front door has certainly pushed a slice of responsibility their way.
The victim’s flatmate was obviously frustrated as well, exclaiming that ‘for them to be reducing security to a 9 to 5 is insanity’. He argued that ‘the service [UCL Accommodation] are providing, and what they’re charging, allows them to make a huge amount of [profit]’. He also acknowledged that the members of UCL’s security team are also greatly underpaid, which is yet another argument supporting the fact that UCL Accommodation are more focused on surplus profits than student safety.
Even students at the comparatively modern Astor College have had to rely more heavily on WhatsApp group chats than on the hall security to keep them safe. One resident of Astor College between 2022 and 2023, shockingly recounted that a student in the flat next to hers had also been the victim of a robbery, and that an unknown individual was supposedly lurking around the building at around 7:30pm on 8 February 2023. The Astor resident told us that: ‘The only reason we knew there was a robber is because we saw the texts’
Allegedly, the man stole ‘a watch and 2000 yen’. 2000 yen is about £10 and The Cheese Grater is uncertain as to the value of the watch. What is certain, however, is that no student should fear any item or amount of money – be it two laptops or a tenner – might be stolen from their room in UCL halls.
What’s more concerning is the fact that an unidentified man was able to stalk around Astor College, slipping in unnoticed by security. Once again, there seems to be little concern about the safety of the students and, like in Ifor Evans, the possibility of a random intruder could have had much more serious consequences.
Following the incident at Astor College, the Hall’s overseers did email students, encouraging them to check who they let into the building behind them. These emails do seem to have been a fairly futile attempt to tighten security.
Apparently, even a hall renovated as recently as 2019 cannot escape the curse of unlocked doors. The Astor resident we spoke to went on to explain that ‘anyone who’s ever been to Astor College knows that these doors stay open for a good minute and you can’t close them any faster than that’.
So who, or what, is to blame for the eruption of robberies and the lack of locks in recent years? Well, since September 2021, security has only been present from 9am to 5am on working days in Bloomsbury area accommodations. As such, around 2000 residents have paid similar (if not higher) fees as previous years whilst seeing their security reduced.
Even more disappointingly, the Students’ Union appears to be unbothered by this. On 5th December 2022, the Welfare and Community Zone meeting passed a policy to bring back security to all UCL halls permanently with 89% of the vote. In the Union Executive meeting (this is a higher board than the Welfare and Community Zone) held on 12 December 2022, the policy was proposed again by Umair Mehmood, the then Welfare and Community Officer.
However, the proposal was to become yet another helpless victim of Union bureaucracy. After the Representation and Democracy manager clarified that ‘the Union Executive cannot make amendments to policies’, the proposal was banished back to the ‘Welfare Community Zone’ where it had just come from. The minutes from the next Welfare and Community Zone meeting in February don’t mention the word ‘security’ once.
The most highly publicised service available to students in a security emergency is the SafeZone app. However, students who have used the app appear to have run into some serious limitations. When the John Tovell resident we spoke to had to use it, after locking himself out of his room, he explained that ‘they had an ongoing incident somewhere else, and I had to wait three hours to get back in’. The resident revealed that, unsurprisingly, the team is severely understaffed and cannot deal with multiple incidents occurring simultaneously as they ‘only have one security team’.
The Cheese Grater has endeavoured to gain comment from three of the 2022/2023 hall reps over the course of our investigation, seeking to gain their opinions, insights, and goals relating to security deficiencies.
Unfortunately, we received no answer from two of them, and the third refused to be interviewed. Hall reps are certainly not responsible for UCL Accomodation’s second-rate security measures, and definitely do not have unlimited jurisdiction to implement solutions. However, their refusal to assure their role as a spokesperson in support of their hall residents is greatly disappointing.
Ultimately, it appears that UCL Accomodation and The Students’ Union have no interest in reintroducing 24 hour security into UCL halls. Employing and fairly paying more security staff would allow emergencies to be responded to quicker, and unlockable doors to be fixed in a timely fashion.
The consequences of UCL’s poor security measures have already resulted in multiple robberies and the potential for something worse to happen will remain until more time, money, and energy is spent revitalising the security system at UCL halls. Maybe then students at John Tovell House will be able to use the bathroom in peace.