Tag: detail

  • We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    If you’ve heard Jacqui Smith interviewed since she became minister, you’ll know that she’s been saying that the Skills and Post-16 White Paper has been nearly ready for quite some time.

    It may well be the case that most of the contents of the paper have been pretty much locked in for a good while, with others added to the work in progress as the need became apparent.

    And it isn’t just a Department for Education thing. Every part of government will have had an input, both during the formal “write round” that has just concluded and earlier in policy development. The launch will be in the government’s grid – lines will be agreed across Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.

    And there will be a story to tell. Which is where we find our problem.

    Big P

    The most common criticism leveled against Keir Starmer, by his own party more than anyone, is his inability to sell a big picture. Starmer, like many attracted to public policy and public service, is into details, implementation, and delivery. If five to ten years ago our politics was dominated by grand narratives (Brexit, the whole Boris Johnson thing, Liz Truss’ persecution complex), Sunak and Starmer both came to power with more than a whiff of “the grown ups are back in the room”. Delivery rules, ideology drools.

    There’s any amount of polling that suggests much of the frustration among voters is due to things just not working as well or as smoothly as they should. From getting an appointment with a GP, to getting support for a child struggling at school, to getting a dangerous pothole fixed it can feel like the UK is riven with structures and processes on the point of collapsing.

    A part of this is underinvestment – since 2010 funding for local government (which is responsible for the potholes and the pupil support) has collapsed, while growing funding for the NHS (which is responsible for the GP) has not covered increases in demand and has been blunted by numerous top-down reorganisations.

    But a part of this is an inability to do the hard yards on delivery, something which Starmer and Labour are keen to fix. Admirable intentions, but it is much harder to explain to people that we are at the start of a long, complex, and difficult process of renewal than to make absurd promises, stir up xenophobia, and have people believe that these days you can get arrested and put in jail just for saying you are English.

    Even delivery needs a story. Tony Blair, for all his myriad faults as a human being, was your archetypal get-you-one-that-does-both. But that is a rare skillset. The rest of us flounder making dull but important stuff sound interesting and inspiring.

    And so the story begins

    The opportunity mission in the Labour election manifesto highlighted a focus on improving the life chances of children, right the way through from pre-school to entering the workforce. In government, the formal measure of the success for this area of work is the proportion of young people in education or employment-with-training, and the number achieving higher level qualifications.

    Sounds like a set of indicators in need of a target? It doesn’t take a huge strategic leap to read across from this to the Prime Minister’s announcement at conference: a target of around 60 per cent (or two thirds, it all depends which announcement you read) of young people in higher education or a “gold standard” apprenticeship.

    That’s not a target that, if read strictly by the numbers, has much to do with “widening access” as traditionally described: there’s no sub-targets for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For that we look at Bridget Phillipson’s preview of the decision to reintroduce targeted grants (ignoring for the moment the plan to fund them via an international student fee levy).

    But this is unlikely to be the only intervention that is aimed directly at widening access. We know now that V levels – a BTEC-esque option that will sit between very academic A levels and apprenticeship-like T levels – will add another option to the choices offered aged 16, hopefully keeping more people in education for longer.

    Even though the opportunity mission focuses on young people, we also know that the government is concerned with what we might call “adult skills”. Over in the economic growth mission is where find all the stuff about Skills England and training providers. What we don’t find – even though it by rights should be there – is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, a Boris Johnson policy of letting adult learners access student loan style finance which ended up accidentally re-writing the entire basis of student loan finance.

    Another Johnson-era policy that plays in here are the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which help local employers ensure that their prospective employees are given the opportunity to develop the skills they need. Supposedly Skills England adds the national perspective on these local plans, helping to design identified skills needs into wider initiatives like apprenticeship standards and qualification design.

    Universities and higher education don’t exactly jump off the page of either of these missions. Accordingly, policy interventions in the sector have been minimal. The inflationary fee increase was a simple matter of letting existing information work in the way it was originally intended. The changes to implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was simply a matter of removing the actually insane components of an otherwise largely pointless piece of legislation.

    Vote reform

    But there was another early intervention – a letter from Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson that has become known as the “HE reform” agenda (not to be confused with the “HE reform” consultation from 2022, that almost established student number controls based on minimum eligibility requirements). It was a series of asks for the sector, perceived as a quid pro quo for the return of the inflationary fee increase.

    In essence this had five components. Let’s use the minister’s exact words:

    • Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students
    • Make a stronger contribution to economic growth
    • Play a greater civic role in their communities
    • Raise the bar further on teaching standards, to maintain and improve our world-leading reputation and drive out poor practice
    • Underpinning all of this needs to sit a sustained efficiency and reform programme

    What’s interesting here is the absence of targets. Phillipson wants a stronger role, a stronger contribution, a greater role, a raising of the bar – but how far and how high, and how will she know when she has what she wants? It is a fair guess that we are due some numbers on these aspirations.

    The other thing to pull out here is the relationship between the regulator and the government. In England, most of these HE reform requests involves work that sits under the Office for Students (I’m happy to accept written submissions suggesting that Research England has oversight on elements of economic growth and the civic role).

    A pattern that I’ve recently been noticing is that OfS and DfE to not appear to be moving in sync at the moment – a DfE consultation on franchise arrangements appeared shortly before a largely unconnected OfS consultation on the same topic, OfS appeared to be startled by the appearance of its own guidance letter, and the biggest thing OfS has done recently – the mega-consultation on quality – appears to have blindsided DfE.

    So achieving the HE reform objectives (however loosely specified) also involves regulatory reform. And that regulatory reform appears to be closely tied to the Behan review.

    Quality Behan-cement

    Towards the end of the last government it was open season on reviewing the Office for Students. The Department for Education conducted a (largely unhelpful) legislative review of the way HERA was working in 2022, which spurred the House of Lords Industry and Regulators committee to foreground some of the more egregious failings of the OfS. The Behan review, which built on the findings of both, was one of the periodic reviews of regulators that usually pass without notice – what was notable was that the review author proceeded to take over as interim chair after the sad loss of James Wharton from public life.

    Behan’s review was focused on making regulation work better – focusing on efficacy, accountability, governance, and efficiency. It is the source – for example – of the plans to bring together the Teaching Excellence Framework and the B3 conditions of registration into a single quality assurance system. This modified and expanded TEF will, in future, feed into the eligibility of providers to access certain funds and opportunities – in particular the ability to offer Lifelong Learning Entitlement modules.

    Much of Behan was predicated on changes to primary legislation – the contradictions and confusion within HERA was getting in the way of a streamlined regulatory approach. We’ve been over some of the possibilities of tidying up legislation on the site before – it’s niche stuff unlikely to raise pulses outside of Wonkhe’s most devoted readership. And it would be a brave government that promoted a glossy higher education and skills bill devoid entirely of policy – imagine, given the mess the sector is in, trying to front out legislative proposals that basically amount to letting the OfS board choose the chief executive rather than the secretary of state?

    The question of regulation has also hit the headlines with an onslaught of problems with franchising. Currently students can be registered at one provider and taught elsewhere, with the quality of that teaching (and the outcomes experienced by those students) falling outside of the OfS’ ambit. There are both OfS and DfE proposals designed to address this issue – a DfE consultation required that teaching partners over a certain size needing to be registered with OfS, and an OfS consultation called for new conditions of registration for registering partners.

    The frustration is palpable – with DfE recently called out by the courts for riding roughshod over due process in order to censure Oxford Business College, and the National Audit Office calling on OfS, DfE, and the Student Loans Company to get their act together in addressing instances of student loan fraud. The regulatory toolkit is simply not up to the job.

    Fun with funding

    OfS, meanwhile, has very much been thinking about funding – a quietly radical change to the collection rules for HESES (the means by which we get the student number information that underpins most of the remaining direct OfS grants), adding in some very detailed information on subjects, prefigures a forthcoming consultation on how it uses the money (just under £2bn) it still allocates for high-cost subjects and student premiums.

    Any subject based approach, when it appears, will surely be informed by the government’s own list of priority subjects – found (again) within the eligibility rules for the LLE, and ported across to the eligibility of some students from deprived backgrounds for new maintenance grants. For all the talk of a data-driven Skills England, and detailed information on precise employer demands, the list is broad. We’re broadly in STEM world, plus architecture (but not landscape gardening), nursing and allied health, and economics. And not medicine.

    Meanwhile, university finances have reached the stage where the only reliable source of income is via recruiting international students. This approach took a knock with changes to dependent visas for most students, but now the government has decided that it wants a slice via a levy – which will be used (in part) to support these new maintenance grants.

    With both provider and student finances at breaking point (genuine financial hardship, attrition, job losses, course cuts), there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for a meaningful rethink of funding in either case. Despite everyone yelling about nothing else since the pandemic, it appears to be the one thing that is definitely off the table in the short to medium term.

    Pieces of paper

    A white paper is a consultation – it is a selection box of policies and plans pulled together to present the next chapter of the government’s narratives on opportunities, skills, and the economy. It will certainly contain measures designed to address the knotty technical and implementation issues described above, but it also requires an element of vision.

    On one level, there is clearly a – very broad – skills vision. The language of opportunity, and of parity of respect for academic and vocational routes, is a rich and resonant one. It is no coincidence that every UK government for the past decade as used a version of this narrative, and it has been duplicated (with a few tweaks) across the ideological spectrum precisely because it is so powerful. However, an increasingly prominent component of this story has been positioned as a critique of the current state of affairs, and the plight of our universities and wider higher education sector. Despite the diversity of the sector, it is specifically universities – and a particular, largely inaccurate popular perception of universities – that are being seen as a problem on the way to a skills-led solution rather than an underfunded and struggling keystone.

    While the policies over every party have elements of this counter-narrative too – the Labour variant is perhaps kinder than the alternatives (see, for example, Badenoch). But it is not a full-throated defence of the sector. It is not simple or straightforward to draw together the various things Labour has done in the higher education space and tell a convincing story that includes a theory of change and a desired end state.

    So, while it is fairly straightforward to parse the hints and directions of travel that the past 18 months have brought into a series of likely next steps, the fact that none of these steps do much to inspire suggests that this can’t be the whole story. If it was, we’d be looking at a series of uncontroversial pieces of secondary legislation and some changes to the regulatory framework.

    The format of a white paper demands a little more.

    Source link

  • DfE sets out the detail on the free speech act

    DfE sets out the detail on the free speech act

    In some ways, there’s little that’s new in the Department for Education’s Command Paper on the future of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.

    Over 30 pages or so, it basically puts some meat on the bones of the two announcements made by Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson – the one from last Summer where the act’s implementation was paused, and the one from January which discussed the plan in outline to partially repeal.

    This isn’t the first Command Paper from DfE on the issue – back in 2021, then Secretary of State Gavin Williamson’s effort was a fairly heavily ideological compendium of Telegraph stories and Policy Exchange talking points – picking up everything from cancel culture to students being encouraged “to report others for legal speech”.

    This run at things tends to deftly avoid all of that. It’s about as technical as you can get, with pretty much all of the critique justifying the approach based on workability and burden. Even that “sources close to the Secretary State” quote from last Summer on the Act representing some sort of “hate speech charter” is missing in action here – with the only discussion on harassment surrounding the ban on non-disclosure agreements.

    That’s either savvy politics from a government keen to douse down culture war flames, or a hostage to fortune when OfS’ particular approach to the balancing act between free speech and EDI at some stage comes back to bite – with ministers caught in the middle.

    And we’re off

    We already knew that the government had decided to commence the duties on providers regarding freedom of speech and academic freedom, as set out in Section 1 of the Act. The regulations were made on 28 April 2025, the duties come into force on 1 August 2025, and we got some actual (if controversial) guidance from OfS on 19 June.

    These include requirements for providers to take reasonably practicable steps to secure freedom of speech within the law for staff, members, students, and visiting speakers, as well as protecting academic freedom for academic staff. The Command Paper is keen to point out that the expanded definition of academic freedom will be retained, protecting academic staff from suffering adverse employment consequences solely based on their opinions or ideas.

    Ditto Section 2 of the Act, which covers constituent institutions of providers. DfE says that its decision ensures that constituent institutions such as colleges, schools, or halls within universities (for example, the individual colleges at Oxford and Cambridge) are subject to the same obligations as their parent HE providers.

    It says that the clarification was particularly important to put beyond doubt that these constituent institutions cannot avoid the freedom of speech duties that apply to the main institution – although to the extent to which you see these things as a see-saw, that does mean that Oxbridge Colleges will each be able to maintain their own free speech code of practice, while it’s the central university that will hold a central responsibility for the harassment and sexual misconduct duty as of 1 August.

    Given that Oxbridge colleges tend to be fiercely guarded about their autonomy and independence, that harassment duty and features like its “single source of information” were going to be interesting enough – but given that OfS’ free speech guidance repeatedly mentions harassment considerations when making decisions on free speech, you can see how some astonishing complexity and internal conflict could be coming further down the track.

    It’s also worth noting in passing that while DfE seems keen to put Oxbridge colleges’ direct duties beyond doubt, there’s nothing in here on transnational education – which as we noted in the commentary on OfS’ guidance, is asserted to be outside of the scope of the Act without anything in the way of meaningful justification.

    The other thing in this section is DfE’s pride at extending the non-disclosure agreement ban OfS was already putting in place for harassment and sexual misconduct cases to bullying. It quotes campaigns like “Can’t buy my silence”, but of course doesn’t explain to students why silence can be bought over other types of complaint.

    Yes yous

    The original version of the Bill proposed regulating students’ unions directly – although notably, the SUs of those constituent colleges were to have been exempted on the basis that the college exercises sufficient control.

    Pretty much by accident, that did mean that an FE union whose College was on the register and in receipt of OfS funding was going to be expected to bear all of the complex legal duties and issue a Code of Practice – even if it was unincorporated and run entirely by FE (rather than HE) volunteers.

    So entirely sensibly, there’s confirmation that the government has decided to repeal sections 3 and 7 of the act in their entirety, which would have imposed the direct freedom of speech duties and given OfS regulatory powers over them.

    The workaround is the one that’s been in place since 1994 – regulating SUs through their provider. The rationale for repeal centres on concerns that SUs can lack the financial resources, regulatory capacity, and legal expertise to handle complex duties, that monetary penalties or damage awards could severely impact their ability to provide services and support to students, and the government recognised that SUs are already regulated as charities by the Charity Commission, which oversees their compliance with legal duties including furthering educational purposes through enabling discussion and debate.

    So instead of direct regulation, the government has decided to adopt our proposal from 2021 – the government will expect providers to take reasonably practicable steps to ensure their students’ unions follow codes of practice, which is what already happens over a whole range of issues. Some will see that as an attack on autonomy, others a charter for avoidance – sensible people will see this as the approach that will work.

    Or at least it should work, were it not for the fact that OfS seems to be requiring universities (and therefore by proxy their SUs) to adopt an approach to the balance between free speech and harm that is not legally compliant. More on that in our commentary on OfS’ guidance, suffice to say that SUs at the sharp end of some of the tensions may end up resolving that what OfS might have told them to do is not what they actually should do on a given issue.

    Complainants will be able to complain about the reasonably practicable steps thing – DfE civil servants may have forgotten that the Education Act 1994 also sets up some statutory complaints requirements on SUs themselves, which involve provider review. The other odd bit is that DfE’s amendments to the Act will require providers to set out in their Code of Practice how their students’ union will ensure that affiliation is not denied to any student society on the grounds of its lawful policy or objectives, or the lawful ideas or opinions of its members.

    That goes slightly further than the compliance already expected of SUs as charities over protected beliefs, and extends (very slightly) an existing provision in the Education Act 1994 that the procedure for allocating resources to groups or clubs should be fair and should be set down in writing and freely accessible to all students. It’ll cause conflict at the edges – students do expect to be able to vote on things, and votes can be problematic – but overall this all makes sense.

    Tort a lesson

    You might remember the controversy over the statutory tort – the thing that would have allowed staff, students, and external speakers to bring civil claims against HE providers, constituent institutions, or students’ unions for breaches of their freedom of speech duties.

    The government’s rationale for repealing that bit centres on concerns about its potentially harmful effects on the higher education sector – a chilling effect on freedom of speech that might make institutions more risk-averse about inviting challenging or controversial speakers due to fear of litigation. And so given judicial review, employment tribunals, the OIA complaints scheme for students, and the forthcoming enhanced OfS complaints scheme are all alternatives, plus the financial burden of potential legal costs, it’s gone.

    That all pretty much matches Lords speeches opposed to the Tort at the end of 2022 – this we might expect this to re-emerge as a flashpoint when all of this finds its “appropriate legislative vehicle”.

    This section also says that the government is also concerned that the threat of legal proceedings might lead institutions to prioritise protecting hateful or degrading speech over the interests of those who feel harassed or intimidated – an interesting idea given that both hateful and degrading speech can still be within the law, or at least OfS’ interpretation of it.

    Complaints chaos

    As expected, the Office for Students is going to be stripped of the ability to hear complaints from… students over academic freedom and freedom of speech.

    To be fair, the sensible rationale there is that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) is a well-established route that is recognised and understood by students and providers – and that approach will prevent students being baffled about who to approach, or worse, arbitrary categories that had the potential to take a wide-ranging complaint and insist on it being sliced up.

    That won’t remove the potential problem of students on one end of the see-saw and staff on the other each making complaints about the same issue – or OfS and OIA potentially making different judgements. There’s also the prospect that OfS and OIA will handle things at a different pace, and while OfS was proposing to allow a complaint to roll in without exhausting internal procedures, OIA usually needs a Completion of Procedures letter.

    It’s all very well asking the OIA to look at OfS’ guidance, but presumably there’s some risk that the OIA will look at the way OfS is defining free speech within the law and have representations made to it that disagree. Wales would feel pretty aggrieved if OfS’ particular interpretation was imposed on it via OIA’s dual country coverage, and presumably it would be wild for the OIA to say one thing about an incident in Wales and another in England.

    It all feels like the two bodies are being asked to get in a room and talk – on that, DfE just points at Section 63 of HERA (OfS may co-operate with others where appropriate) and says you two should talk. It might strengthen it if needs be.

    DfE also says that it will ask OfS to consider and then set out in requirements or guidance what fit for purpose internal complaints processes for academic freedom look like, although you could just as easily ask the OIA to build something into its Good Practice Framework.

    The other aspect here is that the legislation will switch from OfS having a power rather than a duty to consider complaints under its scheme. DfE says that will enable it to prioritise, for example, the most serious complaints or complaints on issues affecting the whole sector.

    The expectation is that “OfS and Dr Ahmed” will be transparent, independent and neutral in how they prioritise consideration of those complaints – notwithstanding the position-taking evident in the guidance already, that presumably points to some sort of criteria for folk to fight about.

    Lurking in the background of all that is academic freedom – in its consultation on the complaints scheme, OfS pointed at the Higher Education and Research Act and said “the Act will require us to consider every complaint that is capable of being referred under the scheme. It does not preclude us from considering matters of academic judgement.”.

    The OIA of course can’t look at such matters – and with “duty” switched to “power”, we’re going to need OfS to take a view on whether it will do things for staff and speakers that the OIA won’t be able to do for students.

    Foreign funding

    The one policy area where an announcement was pending was section 9 of the legislation, related to OfS’ monitoring of overseas funding to providers with an eye to assessing the extent to which such funding presents risks to freedom of speech and academic freedom. This measure is not currently in force.

    When Bridget Phillipson updated Parliament on Labour’s plans in January, it was the one area where a decision was not announced:

    I will take more time to consider implementation of the overseas funding measures. I remain fully committed to tackling cases of interference by overseas Governments, and the wider measures in the Act will further strengthen our protections. However, I want to ensure that any new reporting requirements for providers add value without being overly burdensome. We continue to work at pace with the sector on the wider implementation of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme. My officials are working across Government and with the sector to review our response, and I will confirm my final decision in due course.

    Now we get a decision of sorts – and that decision is to continue to keep this under review, and introduce “alternative mitigations to support HE providers to improve international due diligence.”

    For a long time under the last government, the response to any and all bugbears that commentators and politicians had with universities’ and students’ relationships with other countries – ranging from overreliance on international students from certain countries, to research collaborations in weapons technology, to transnational repression, to the activities of Confucius Institutes and Chinese student associations – was that this would all be sorted out through the twin approach of the free speech act and the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). Labour has instead taken the approach that the latter needs to be implemented first.

    FIRS will come into effect on 1 July – we reviewed its implications for the sector back in April – and the policy paper promises to assess what comes out of it. FIRS, we are told, will provide “greater visibility of foreign state influence in the UK,” and information disclosed will be shared with DfE and OfS where relevant, allowing for pattern recognition as well as the prevention of specific threats.

    The alternative – that is, additional – mitigations mentioned above include asking the Office for Students to “consider the value of an explicit regulatory expectation” around due diligence on international partnerships. There’s also work on possible codes of practice and best practice sharing.

    The caveat here is that as FIRS is implemented:

    …it may demonstrate that further reporting on financial or other international arrangements would be beneficial to improve the identification and mitigation of these risks. As a result, we will keep the overseas funding provisions in the act under review in the event that, during FIRS implementation, evidence indicates further transparency reporting is necessary.

    But it feels that the government has come down on the side of listening to the sector about avoiding burden and duplication and, as the paper says, “minimising diversion of resources away from teaching and research.”

    There’s an interesting table on pages 24 and 25 of the command paper, perhaps anticipating criticism over the wait-and-see approach. The table lists all the different measures (ATAS, export controls, harassment duties, financial monitoring, national security act powers) that are already in place to mitigate against “foreign interference”, even without implementing OfS’ new powers.

    (In this context it’s worth briefly noting that Monday’s industrial strategy announced that the government will consult on updating the definitions of the 17 areas of the economy subject to mandatory notification under the National Security and Investment Act, to ensure that they remain “targeted and proportionate”. This could – potentially – see a slight loosening of the areas of research collaboration where higher education institutions need to notify and get approval from the government.)

    Equality impacts

    Finally, there’s a very odd section at the end of the command paper that describes and comments on an Equality Impact Assessment that DfE has, for some mysterious reason, not actually published.

    One of the sections might give us a clue as to why:

    Expanding these duties may lead to more open expression of views which could have a negative impact on those who currently face elevated levels of lawful but offensive comments related to their protected characteristics. They could also potentially lead to increased unlawful harassment against groups with specific protected characteristics.

    It’s almost as if DfE doesn’t want to publish a document that makes the legislation Phillipson is progressing sound like a “Tory hate charter” after all.

    It all partly depends on how OfS plays its duty – again, see the article on the meaning of free speech within the law – but you’d also have to assume that the detail is pretty bleak, and/or offers up all of the remaining fine lines and rhetorical contradictions being dumped on universities to navigate. The tort might be gone, but all of that complexity very much remains.

    Source link

  • Renters’ Rights Bill – The Devil’s in the Detail

    Renters’ Rights Bill – The Devil’s in the Detail

    • By Martin Blakey, the former Chief Executive of the student housing charity Unipol and a member of the British Property Federation’s Student Accommodation Committee.

    HEPI has maintained, as one would expect, a serious interest in student housing and the impact this Bill will have on students. The last update was given on 3 February 2025, and since then, there have been significant developments. On that basis, this update covers three areas:

    1. Work has finally commenced on how purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) will transition from the current assured student tenancy regime into common law tenancies, as those tenancies are largely outside the provisions of the Act;
    2. The Renters’ Rights Bill (RRB) is now at the Lords Committee Stage, and on 22 April 2025, around half the day was taken up discussing student-related housing, giving a clear indication of the Government’s thinking on the outcome of the Bill and student housing; and
    3. The Government-approved Unipol/ANUK National Code has undergone significant revision and is now out for public consultation before its final text is agreed.

    Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA)

    Long overdue work is now taking place by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to establish the mechanism whereby PBSA providers will become ‘specified’ under the Housing Act (1988). This will put them outside the remit of much of the Renters’ Rights legislation.

    As part of the earlier discussions on this with the British Property Federation (and their Student Accommodation Committee), MHCLG had previously advised that existing tenancies would automatically become common law tenancies. However, on 1 April, Unipol was informed that there were problems with this and that Assured Shorthold Tenancies (ASTs) existing before the implementation of the Act will now transition to be assured tenancies that will fall under the remit of the Act.

    This may seem a rather nerdy legal change with little impact, but it would be a mistake to conclude that.

    The timescale of the Bill has self-evidently slipped from the initial aim of obtaining Royal Assent by Easter 2025, and the Government is racing to ensure that it passes through all its parliamentary stages by the summer recess on July 22, 2025. Some aspects of the Act will be subject to further detailed consultation, but the main tenure reforms will be implemented quickly. This rush to get the Bill through its parliamentary stages may explain the evident ‘make do and mend’ approach to the transition of PBSA tenancies. This rush certainly explains the Government’s unwillingness to accept any non-Government amendments in both the Commons and the Lords.

    Because PBSA tenancies will now transition into assured tenancies, the timing of implementation is important because it will determine the extent to which the PBSA market will be disrupted by this change of position. It is reasonable to conclude that tenure changes are likely to occur around December 2025 or January 2026. Since most students living in PBSA will have already signed contracts for the 2025–26 academic year, around 402,000 students are expected to be affected, based on the Unipol/NUS Accommodation Cost Survey 2021. Only bed spaces provided directly by universities will fall outside of these transitional arrangements.

    So, what are those arrangements?

    Previous AST tenants, as they become assured tenants, will:

    • Be able to pay rent monthly, and longer payment periods will be unenforceable. It is not yet clear whether rent already paid in advance will have to be refunded.
    • Be able to give two months’ notice and then leave their contracts.
    • Be able to remain in their property because the fixed-term nature of their previous contract has been abolished.

    So how will PBSA providers be able to guarantee room availability for the start of 2026-27?

    For those students living in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), MHCLG say that providers will be able to give notice under the new repossession ground 4a for students. This will allow repossession to take place between June and September, thus ensuring those rooms are available for new student tenants. But here, the new system is not clear because, as Baroness Taylor Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said in the Lords on 22 April 2025:

    The core aim of the Bill is to enhance the security of tenants in the private rented sector, including students. The prior notice requirement in ground 4A is key to this. If tenants are liable to be evicted through no fault of their own simply because of their student status, they must be informed of this reduced security before entering into a tenancy.

    And in the case of PBSA tenants, this notice will not have been given. MHCLG say that legislative changes will be made to allow for such a notice to be given within 28 days of the implementation of the Act but, so far, there is no sign of how that will be achieved, nor was it referenced in the Lords Committee debate.

    But ground 4a only applies to HMOs (roughly defined as a dwelling housing three or more students). PBSA has very few two-bed flats, but it does have 78,000 studio flats that will fall outside of ground 4a. In these cases, students can stay as long as they wish, provided they give two months’ notice of when they want to leave.

    Many of those involved at the coal-face in student accommodation will know that each year there are many requests (particularly from international postgraduates who make up the majority of the market for studios) to extend their contracts from September to just before Christmas (the reasons are various, ranging from over-running dissertation time to wanting to attend the pre-Christmas degree ceremonies). These students have to be moved on in order to make way for incoming new students – now they will be able to stay.  So, in the case of studios, PBSA suppliers will not be able to guarantee room availability to incoming students until the outgoing students have served notice (and they may ‘forget’ to do this anyway).

    If PBSA studio tenants decide to stay on for a further year (as some do as they move from masters to research degrees), then their transitional assured tenancy status will stay with them until they choose to leave.

    This added flexibility may sound great for current students, but it is very bad news for the cost and availability of accommodation for future students, particularly those looking for housing in 2026-27.

    For PBSA providers, this transitional phase is an administrative and legal nightmare; they

    • will have to re-tool their rent collection systems;
    • change their legal documentation;
    • serve specified notice to gain repossession;
    • deal with student tenants who can come and go as they wish; and
    • absorb the possibility of additional voids if students choose to leave their accommodation mid-year

    And there are other implications:

    • Students remaining in their accommodation when they are no longer students will cause many providers to be in breach of their planning permissions, which stipulate student-only occupation;
    • The Act does not allow landlords to discriminate against tenants who may have children, but it is generally accepted that PBSA studios are not a suitable environment to house children (and housing children may place the landlord in breach of any licensing conditions imposed by the local authority).

    Politicians may say ‘So what?’; this is only a transitional phase. But it is important to remember that in private sector housing, the tenant pays for everything, and so these added (and unnecessary) costs are likely to be reflected in future supply uncertainty and higher rent levels.

    Furthermore, this ‘transitional phase’ goes directly against what the Government said was going to happen when Matthew Pennycook, the Minister for Housing and Planning, said to parliament (on 19 December 2024):

    The Bill will exempt Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) from the assured tenancy system if the landlord is signed up to a government approved code of management practice.

    No mention of a disastrous ‘transitional phase’. The shifting goalposts approach of MHCLG has significantly eroded trust among housing providers in the Government’s ability to manage the transition of PBSA to common law tenancies without further problems emerging.

    Does it have to be like this?

    Well no. Firstly, the Government could seek to mitigate the effect of the transitional phase by having a time-limited new repossession ground (say 4b) which would allow repossession for students living in PBSA studios in line with existing Ground 4a. That would, at least, maintain the academic cycle on the availability of accommodation – but perhaps they are in too much of a rush to get the Bill approved to consider this.

    Secondly, the Government could seek to mitigate how many students were affected by these transitional arrangements by using powers the Secretary of State already has (under Section 8 of the Rent Act 1977 and paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 to the Housing Act 1988) to give specified status now to PBSA providers, ahead of the RRA implementation. Using those existing powers the wording in an SI could be:

    The following bodies of persons (whether unincorporated or bodies corporate) are hereby specified as bodies for the purposes of paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 to the Housing Act 1988, that is to say –

    any person managing or having control of purpose-built student accommodation if the accommodation let or to be let is registered with a code of practice which has been approved by the appropriate national authority under powers conferred by section 233 of the Housing Act 2004.

    This would mean that as soon as that Statutory Instrument was approved (and that could be done by the end of May 2025), tenancies issued after that would then be common law tenancies and this would drastically reduce the number of tenancies in any transitional stage.

    In the Lords, Baroness Taylor said the reason that Ministers were seeking additional powers to create specified status (in clause 34 of the Bill) instead of using powers they already had was:

    Although there is an existing power in the Housing Act 1988 to exempt PBSA landlords, it would have required government to frequently update secondary legislation with a list of landlords, causing a duplication of work between code administrators and officials and a lag in the link between code membership and exemption status.

    Even if this were true (there is no reason why the list of ‘landlords’ needs to be individually specified), this supposed ‘duplication of work’ over the transitional period would require a great deal less work to be done than that being caused by the Government’s currently disruptive and onerous proposals.

    Why has this ‘transition problem’ appeared now? 

    It may be unkind to conclude that after three year’s discussion with Unipol (who run the relevant Government-approved Code and the BPF) that real work by MHCLG has only just started on their own proposal and there are issues to be resolved. Even following the Minister’s statement that new powers will be granted under Clause 34 of the Housing Act, where are those new powers? There is, as yet, no evidence of any drafting of the new Statutory Instrument/s now that those are apparently needed.

    This ‘dog’s dinner’ rushed approach to the PBSA transition period has still to play out fully, and more detailed work is still required to achieve implementation.

    The Lords Committee Stage

    There was considerable discussion about students on 22 April 2025 in the Lords and it is worth highlighting some of the points made because they provide a clear indication of how the Government is thinking about student housing. As Baroness Taylor said in this debate:

    The Government made a clear manifesto commitment to transform the experience of private renting by levelling the playing field decisively between landlords and tenants…One of the reasons the Government do not want to reintroduce fixed terms or anything like them is that they add complexity into the system. Having a simple, single system of periodic tenancies will make it easier for both parties to better understand their rights and responsibilities.

    All the discussion on this Bill has been polarised into a landlord v tenant framework. This approach does not work well in addressing issues within student housing, where a third educational aspect is also relevant: the availability of good-quality housing at the right time of year, allowing students to undertake their studies in the most productive way.

    Security of tenure (the central pillar of the Bill) has only limited value to a very small minority of students and this has been recognised by what might be called ‘intermediary sector bodies’ such as UUK, CUBO, ASRA and Unipol – none of which easily fall into the Bill’s landlord v tenant framework.

    Lord Willetts, in proposing what would have been a useful amendment, eloquently summed up what has happened to student housing during discussions on the Bill:

     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.

    The Government have clearly accepted that there is a need for some special arrangements for student lets…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.

    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.

    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.

    Lord Willetts’ analysis reflects how, initially, the previous Government Bill failed to take much account of the housing needs of students and how pressure from the sector had caused some of those special needs to be recognised and accounted for in a rather grudging and piecemeal fashion.

    In rejecting the amendment (which was supported by Lords from all the major parties), Baroness Taylor, on behalf of the Government said:

    We have thought very carefully about the design of ground 4A. Limiting it to HMOs captures the bulk of typical students—that is, groups living in a house share. Meanwhile, students who need more security of tenure, such as single parents living with their children, postgraduate couples living together who have put down roots in an area, or families containing students, will be protected.

    The core principle of the Bill is that tenants should have more security in their homes, and we think it is right that these groups should not be exposed to potential eviction using ground 4A. Self-contained one-bedroom and two-bedroom homes are also easier to let to non-students than student HMOs are, so, if a landlord cannot gain possession in line with the academic year and the tenants leave in the middle of the next one, the landlord is highly likely to be able to let the property out to non-student tenants…

    What this says indirectly is that the Government accepts that between 25% and 32% (estimates vary) of off-street student housing could be lost by being occupied by non-students, as landlords let properties when they become vacant rather than fitting into the academic cycle. This loss of 138,000 beds (taking the lower estimate) will hit different University towns and cities differently, depending on their housing stock and is likely to take place over the next few years. As an earlier HEPI blog said back in June 2024,

    The concern in student housing was not only about overall supply but the specific reduction of student housing supply because, if students were no different to any other tenant group and could come and go as they pleased, then why would landlords rent to students and incur void periods, when they could rent to other rental groups without having empty rooms in the context of rising overall demand for renting?

    There has been no suggestion of how this lost stock could be replaced – certainly not by newly developed higher cost PBSA bed spaces which has seen net growth of only around 48,000 beds over the last three years and few of these would have been affordable and appropriate for students looking to share with a friend or partner in a lower rental bracket.

    In reality, the Government has not really accepted the sector view that students are a special group and should be catered for separately. The calls for a specialist student tenancy regime have been firmly rejected. As Baroness Taylor made clear:

    It would not be either right or fair for students to have less flexibility than other tenants just because of their educational status.

    As my HEPI blog said back in October 2024:

    It could be that the big gainers from this tenure reform are longer-term family renters and professional renters and that the poorest and most vulnerable in society together with student renters could become ‘collateral damage’. These reforms are well-intentioned by those who campaigned for them, but that does not mean all tenants will be winners from these changes.

    The discussion in the Lords has now confirmed that this collateral damage for students is part of the design within the Bill. Landlords renting non-HMO properties can be reassured about their rent by simply switching their lettings to non-students – tough luck on the students, as their housing supply contracts.

    The revised Unipol/ANUK National Code

    My previous blog on 3 February 2025 outlined possible changes to the private providers’ Code and those have now been worked up into a revised Code. Briefly, these changes are:

    • The continued protection of deposits using a Government-approved deposit protection scheme;
    • Improving the flexibility for students either leaving their institution of study or not gaining a place to study, giving them the right to leave their agreement with a notice period of 4 weeks;
    • That in the event of the death of a tenant, any guarantor agreement would not be proceeded with or enforced;
    • The Code now references the Building Safety Act, the Fire Safety Act and tighter guidance on how to respond to damp and mould; and
    • In handling complaints, timescales have been tightened, and Code Members have been given a clearer pathway to ensure they respond promptly to students complaining.

    Only one significant addition has been made to the revised Code and that follows the Education Minister, Janet Daly MP clarifying the positon of students withdrawing for medical reasons from their studies and the proposed four week notice period has been extended to cover ‘if the occupant has been absent from their course for more than 60 days due to illness and has agreed with their higher education (HE) provider to suspend their studies.‘

    These proposals are subject to both a sector and public consultation period which is taking place across 9th April – 22nd May 2025. Details can be found online here and those interested are encouraged to respond.

    The changes to the Code are designed to protect and improve students’ rights in renting PBSA but, because of the uncertainty caused by the ‘transitional arrangements’ for PBSA providers, they are going into a sector that is now increasingly hostile to the Government’s approach to them and the additional administrative and legal burdens connected with assured tenancy status that have suddenly appeared. It could well be that some responses to these Code changes will be affected by a ‘feel-bad’ factor and may be opposed by some Members.

    Just two observations on the consultation. Firstly, the Code has been drafted so that the additional flexibility given to tenants to give notice on their agreement is restricted to common law tenancies, so these will not apply to transitional assured tenancies (so no ‘double-whammy’) and secondly, it is important for the PBSA sector to look beyond the immediate transitional mess and concentrate on the longer term purpose of the Code which has been a force for good, not just for student housing rights and standards, but for the sector itself, giving the student market a set of recognised value-based rules that is rarely seen in private sector renting. This demonstrates real recognition from the Code’s Members (since the Code’s inception in 2004) that students and the role of housing in education are special and need a bespoke regulatory framework.

    Conclusion

    As reflected throughout HEPI’s work, this blog approaches the issue of student housing as an educational issue and seeks to provide evidence-based observations on the student housing sector. It also seeks to offer some practical suggestions so that the possible cost and chaos in the transitional phase of the Act can be mitigated, particularly for PBSA providers.

    There are still discussions to be held with MHCLG and practical issues to be resolved on how future Statutory Instruments and specified status is to be achieved. So far, although the Government say they are in ‘listening mode’ they seem not to have heard terribly well and the way in which students have been ‘accommodated’ within the Bill has been both secretive and unpredictable. It would be good if a more open relationship on future proposals could be established.

    Finally, this is the first mention of the Department for Education in this blog because they appear to have had no discernible influence or input into a Bill that will both disrupt the student housing market and see some significant reduction in supply. Going back to 24 October, Education Minister Janet Daby MP stressed that the Department for Education was:

    ‘Working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to promote the importance of a strategic approach to meeting student housing needs to providers and local authorities.

    Going forward, it would be good to see some, or any, evidence of that.

    Source link

  • This week in 5 numbers: Education Department adds detail to DEI guidance

    This week in 5 numbers: Education Department adds detail to DEI guidance

    The value of the grant portfolio at Johns Hopkins University affected by an “unexpected stoppage” of funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the institution announced this week. The research university is bracing for cuts amid funding uncertainty caused by the Trump administration.

    Source link