I now officially have a first degree in English Literature! The decision to go to university changed my life unimaginably. At the age of 16, I left school and spent a year working because I was told that I wasn’t ‘academic’. After deciding, I could and would do more, I went back to sixth form and got my A levels. Again, I was told that I wasn’t ‘academic’ enough and that I wouldn’t achieve at university. So, I ended up working for another year until the drive to learn pulled me back to education and university. This decision led to being estranged for first year as my family disagreed with this decision; however, my life began to flourish across the board year after year! The university even paid for me to study in Athens for a year! University may not be for all people but don’t let anyone else make that decision for you. I have thrived at Brighton University and had the best four years of my life… so far!
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On the 15th of May, hundreds of people gathered at Brighton clocktower to protest the ongoing attacks on Gaza and Palestine by Israel. After a hour of speeches and performances the protest then marched through the city, then along the sea front. Undeterred by sudden downpours of rain.
2020 was a problematic year, to say the least, with the pandemic and all the issues associated with the virus many would like to forget the year. Despite the difficulties of living in Greece during the first lockdown and then studying remotely on returning to the UK, I am thankful for the year and the fantastic images that came from it.
During the First World War, the Brighton Pavilion was used as a hospital for Indian troops. There is a certain discourse in Brighton that the Indian troops loved it in Brighton and England as a whole, however, a few letters conflict with this discourse.
There’s a group of first year students in the back of a man’s car… each handing over £450 to a person they only met that day. You wouldn’t think this was a legal or comfortable situation, however, this is the way many of the students are pressured into reserving their house for second year. This is how I reserved my current house.
Once the students (if lucky enough) manage to secure a property, the issues don’t cease. They are hit with ridiculously high guarantor fees and deposits that realistically they know they aren’t going to get back and definitely not in full. You may be wondering what they expect to receive for this excessive amount of money… you wouldn’t expect to have faeces spraying out of your sink or a hole in your bathroom floor allowing people sitting for dinner to watch you sh*t, but this is the reality of student accommodation. The majority of their student loans are being spent on under-par accommodation at outrageous prices, being pushed higher by the quantity of students living in Brighton. This needs to be regulated. Jay Bone is a second-year student who studies at Brighton University. He told me how the estate agents took £150 as a guarantor fee, but when his mother “didn’t earn enough” to qualify as his guarantor, they then fined him £150, which she then paid. Jay thought it outrageous for someone to be fined such a large sum of money for essentially not having enough money. In the end, he had to ask his step dad to become guarantor which was another £150. I spoke to an estate agent, who would rather have his identity kept anonymous, about this situation and he told me that the “the fee will depend on the referencing company used”. He went on to explain that his company charges £90 guarantor fee and out of that £70 will go to the referencing company and the rest is kept by the estate agents. He made it clear that with the change of guarantor it is customary for the charge to be applied again, however, he did say that charging £150 guarantor fee is “pretty unreasonable”. There is hope, however, as he told me “From next year tenants will not be charged at all”, and that all the fees will be charged to the Landlord. The estate agent said that the ‘Tenant Fee Ban’ should be coming into effect in April 2019. This is good news, but begs the question; why have we been paying these fees to start with? After paying the London prices for accommodation in Brighton, you would think the quality of the accommodation would mirror the amount of money you are putting in, unfortunately, this isn’t the case for a lot of students. It was not the case for Amy Betteridge who studies English Literature and Creative writing at Brighton University. When I spoke to Amy, she told me of the scenario mentioned earlier with human faeces squirting all over her bathroom covering a “metre distance” from the sink which also included a housemate’s leg. This situation left Amy feeling “very frustrated, especially to be told by the plumber that the sink hadn’t been correctly installed in the first place”. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning. Amy went on to tell me how her “room stank of cigarette smoke” when she moved in, a problem that should have been dealt with before the move in date. The cleaning process meant she had to leave the room empty for a month, keeping all her belongings in the communal area, impacting the rest of the household. The estate agents did fix all the problems, but not always well. One plumber they sent “changed the floorboards and hammered them down onto a pipe causing it to leak, which made more holes in our kitchen ceiling and the fire alarm and light in the kitchen filled with water”, a second plumber was sent out to fix this. You might be wondering at this point, what compensation Amy received for all these issues, bearing in mind she wasn’t able to live in her room for a month. A month’s rent reimbursed maybe? No… how does £70 Sainsburys voucher sound, to be shared with the house “that worked out at around £14 each”. Amy as you would expect, thought it “disgraceful for all of the problems we faced”. Clearly there are good and bad cases, but when people are paying the amount of money they are, the bad cases should be a rarity, not common place. You may be wondering at this point how frequently situations like this occur, so I contacted Brighton SolFed whose motto is “an injury to one is an injury to all”. They are an ‘anarcho-syndicalist union based in Brighton’ and I knew they could give more depth to this situation. James Woodrow, a member of the group told me; “every week we have people coming to us for help, this can be anything from professionals disputing with landlords over rent increases to students trying to get their deposits back from estate agents”. He made it clear that issues with accommodation are common and that SolFed is here to help those in need as they have “won over ten thousand pounds for tenants, in repairs, reclaimed deposits and compensation”. Most importantly, he wanted the public not to take the estate agents’ word as final and not to give up; “if you find yourself backed in a corner then we will help get you out of it”. Estate agents in Brighton have a captive market. They know that every year there will be a massive demand for accommodation between Sussex and Brighton University students. There is nothing in place to prevent the increase in rent, however, there is a need for tighter regulations to prevent the decay of accommodation quality. During the year of 2020, there has been a massive amount of disruption to university life as the majority of learning has moved online due to the pandemic. Many students are now calling for a refund from the government as they feel they have not received the level of education which they paid for.
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