Manchester Metropolitan University students struggling to find accommodation in the city have been offered £100 a week to live in a different city and town. The offer comes after first year students have reported issues with finding a place to stay in the city through the university’s accommodation portal.
Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) says the accommodation crisis has come after it had ‘significantly more offer-holders than anticipated’. While it works to secure places for student within the city, it says it has offered ‘temporary options’ with private hall partners, including those in Liverpool and Huddersfield.
Yesterday, students received a message via the portal saying housing demand in the city is ‘currently the highest’ they have ever experienced. The message went on to offer the waiting students residence at halls 'a short distance away' in Liverpool and Huddersfield.
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It said students taking up the offer of living in Liverpool or Huddersfield - both of which are around 30 miles from Manchester - would be paid £100 a week 'to cover out-of-pocket expenses, including travel costs'. Both the halls in Liverpool and Huddersfield are around a '15 minute walk' from each place's rail station, MMU says, where students would then have to catch a 40-minute train to Manchester.
The Manchester Evening News spoke to one student who received this offer after waiting months to find a place to stay in the city. With her course starting in just two weeks, the photography student from Staffordshire, who preferred to remain anonymous, said they were ‘surprised’ to see the message offering them a place to stay in Liverpool.
Speaking to the MEN, she said: “No one really knows what’s going on, the communication has been awful, we’ve only found this out yesterday because we’ve been told to wait for days. But obviously we weren’t them expecting to come out with a whole new city and offer us that, so it was a surprise.
“I’ve been on the lookout for accommodation since June. I was told to wait until results day and I was expecting places to become available and some apparently did. The whole system of getting accommodation is through a portal, and the information we’ve been told to secure a place is to just stay on the portal and refresh it.
“We’ve been doing that every single day and I still haven’t managed to get accommodation and I’m due to start within two weeks. I live in Staffordshire which would just take about 40 minutes on the train, it would be quite pointless for me to pay however much a week to go to Liverpool.
“That is not the city that I was expecting to live in and it’s competently different experience for me. I’m in a fortunate situation that I’m only 40 minutes away.
"But I’ve been speaking to people who will have to come from London, Scotland and much further places. Their only option is to go with Liverpool or Huddersfield because they’ve got nothing else to choose from.”
A Manchester Metropolitan University spokesperson said: “Manchester is an incredibly popular student city and there is significant demand for accommodation. We have offered places to our target student numbers this year and planned our accommodation based on long-term experience of how many of those offers are likely to be accepted, while also building in a considerable cushion.
“However, significantly more offer-holders than anticipated have been accepting and meeting the conditions of our offer. The issue around accommodation availability affects around 2% of undergraduate students planning to join us in September.
“While we continue to work hard to secure accommodation for them in the city region, we are now providing temporary options with our private hall partners in Liverpool and Huddersfield. We will cover travel costs to Manchester for any students who take up this offer.
“We know that this will be disappointing for them, and we are doing everything we can to find them to rooms in Manchester as soon as we can.”
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