It’s easy to think of the growing student accommodation crisis in the UK as one that is being faced by Britain alone.
But despite landlords here blaming uncertain and growing regulatory burdens as the cause of a decline in the supply of properties into the Private Rental Sector (PRS), and a tendency for others to just throw their hands up and argue that as a subset of the wider crisis we just need to “build more houses”, there is in fact a growing problem right across Europe.
Averaging across the EU, the cost of student housing increased by an average of 38 per cent between 2010 and 2020, making it increasingly unaffordable for many. And the Class Foundation’s European Student Living Monitor report of 2023 highlights that students who encounter financial difficulties are the ones with the worst mental health scores. The UK isn’t bottom of the table – but it’s not far off.
Across Europe, governments’ reluctance to fund the massification of HE directly is causing non-EU migration to be seen as the answer to a financial hole – with resultant housing issues invariably catching municipal, regional and national governments out even when there is a modicum of student housing planning. Add to that high inflation and interest rates, the switching of the PRS into holiday letting and governments acting to protect tenants from exploitation in markets where competition fails to do the job, and you can see a crisis everywhere.
