It’s been a rough term for the once- mighty UCL Residences. The accom- modation racketeers not only face the prospect of repaying a total of £400,000 to residents of Hawkridge House and Campbell House West after lengthy and ultimately successful rent strikes, but also the potentially ruinous proposition of residents from all of its halls going on strike – something campaign group UCL Cut the Rent is currently agitating for. Despite a string of humiliating and very public defeats inflicted by the vocal pro- testors, however, insider reports suggest management are still doing their best to make students’ lives – and their own – as difficult as possible.
Having already threatened rent strik- ers by claiming they would not be able to graduate whilst still in arrears (see last CG), UCL bosses sent in their biggest hitter, Vice Provost for Operations Rex Knight, to lead the delegation at arbitra- tion panels in October and November. Knight, known to most students as Prov- ost Michael Arthur’s pet pantomime vil- lain, is by all accounts taking the defeat about as well and maturely as he would be expected to. Insiders in attendance at the second of the two hearings – which ruled that Hawkridge residents were enti- tled to a rebate of £1,200 each – report a nonplussed Knight, probably well aware of the inevitability of another defeat, re- fusing to allow student representatives to speak at length.
Dissent from peeved freshers and postgrads in rat-infested, cockroach- ridden residences ought to be the least of management’s worries, how- ever. Ramsay Hall – the £200-a-week Eastern Bloc hospital on Whitfield Street where Coldplay once lived – is set to close for two years from 2017. This, added to ever-growing student numbers, will lead to a shortfall of thousands of beds. So what’s UCL’s solution? Well, they don’t really have one. Though a botched plan to priva- tise halls was kicked into the long grass in 2011, College’s incompetence and mismanagement of their crumbling property portfolio has allowed private operators such as Unite – who have al- ready snapped up 1000 rooms at UCL East, the new Olympic Park campus set to open in 2019 – to extend their lucrative sphere of influence. Luckily for its corporate competition, UCL seems to have given up on doing any of the hard stuff itself anyway. As part of a belated attempt to prove their human- ity to campaigners, residences director William Wilson and property man- ager Colin Plank dragged a member of UCL Cut the Rent to a privately-run hall in Wood Green – known to most as the distant northern terminus of the 29 bus route – in an attempt to extol the virtues of a potential partnership with accommodation firm Veridian. An awkward Tube journey back from Zone 3 followed, the trio having failed to see eye to eye ober the proposed new site.
Of Ramsay’s reputed replacement, one insider tells The Cheese Grater: “There’s no way they are going to go for it. There’s no way they could... be- cause it’d be £140 a week, and then an extra £30 for transport, so that’d be fairly similar to prices of other halls. What’s more, they don’t have the buy- ing power to get new halls, particu- larly as companies such as Unite are expanding so much.”
With the Cut the Rent campaign buoyed by their high profile and proven successes, things are likely to get much worse for Residences before they get better.