How did we get here?
To misquote Jane Austen, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of an HMO must be making a tidy sum”, and nowhere is this more evident than in the streets of Leamington Spa.
A House of Multiple Occupation (HMO is occupied by at least three people, forming more than one household and sharing a toilet, bathroom or kitchen facilities with other tenants, and is the accommodation type favoured by most off-campus students.
There are hundreds of shared student houses in Leamington – up to 40% of the properties in some areas – and so it’s not surprising to learn that nearly 90% of Warwick University students who live off campus have chosen Leamington as their temporary home.
Meanwhile, investors have gathered like vultures to feast off the rich and guaranteed pickings – a yield of over 10% per annum on their investment (plus capital appreciation) - much higher than the gains from letting to a family, because as shared accommodation, HMOs provide multiple income streams. Many landlords reconfigure the available space, cutting rooms in half and then in half again, using flimsy stud walling to create tiny spaces, barely large enough to swing a satchel, and the communal living spaces are often turned into yet more bedrooms. Not only is the resulting accommodation substandard in every sense of the word, it is also overpriced at an average of around £650 pcm per room.
There is supposed to be a 10% limit on the ratio of HMOs in any radius of 100 metres in this town. Yet the Council has cynically allowed Leamington to become the dormitory of choice for a fast-expanding education business empire (Warwick University) which has grown exponentially over the last decade, attracting thousands of students from home and abroad, representing millions of pounds of income.
Instead of creating on-site accommodation for these young people, the University has very strategically ploughed its profits into new teaching blocks and other facilities, leaving profiteering landlords to provide the beds and a tidy profit for themselves at the same time.
“What is wrong with this arrangement?” you might be asking yourself. Firstly, such dense concentrations of young people often results in night noise and other disturbance. Coexisting with this interference on a daily basis is not a great experience for residents. It’s no accident that sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture by some disreputable regimes! Many students, both domestic and EU bring their vehicles with them and suddenly you find that you have to unload your shopping and children half a mile up the road.
Ask anyone who lives next door to an HMO about rubbish and they will roll their eyes and sigh. Neighbours discuss the growing problem of feral foxes attracted by the food refuse and exchange stories of rat sightings. The sheer volume of refuse produced by so many HMOs in such densely populated areas is the problem.
The landlords, meanwhile, are equally cavalier. At the end of the academic year when they clear out the houses ready for cleaning, huge quantities of furniture and other household goods spill onto the streets. It’s a terrible waste, as well as technically qualifying as fly tipping.
Along with the rubbish and the noise/disruption, we now have a new and even more pernicious threat posed by this temporary community: Covid-19 transmission.
Domestic students are arriving by the day from every corner of the Kingdom, whilst their overseas classmates come straight from their home countries by taxi via Birmingham airport. Many students have not travelled from states with which we have an air corridor. Nevertheless, many are not quarantining, not getting tested and going straight out into town. Evidence shows that whilst young people may not be symptomatic, they can transmit the infection as easily as someone who is. Who is protecting the community from this obvious public health risk? Who is raising the issue with the student community, monitoring their behaviour, supporting them through quarantine and ensuring that they ‘play safe’?
And so we return to the issue in hand. Why has WDC allowed this parlous situation to evolve. What’s in it for them? Very little on first sight. Firstly, no HMO can, by definition, be a family home. The hundreds of HMOs currently in operation have therefore effectively depleted the available housing stock in the town for young families and other people seeking a permanent home. Secondly, these HMOs are actually a drain on Council resources. HMOs generate no Council Tax revenue whatsoever as students are exempt and landlords are not required to pay business rates for their very successful home-letting businesses. In other words, landlords are simply earning ‘free’ money. Their 6000+ tenants meanwhile, are exerting extra pressure on Council services – such as refuse collection – and generating no income as a result.
So, we have depleted housing stock, night noise, disturbance, fly-tipping and community transmission of Covid-19 on the debit side of the equation and a big fat zero on the other. How has this happened? Living in parts of central postcodes CV31 and CV32 is beginning to feel increasingly like living in a battle zone.
What can you do about these injustices? Leamington Together is campaigning for the local plan to be upheld, for HMOs to be properly regulated by planning controls and limited to the percentage of households designated by that plan (10%), for houses to be reassigned and returned to town’s housing stock, as has happened in Coventry for example, for HMO landlords to be billed for the services used by their tenants and to halt any more student accommodation of any kind being built in Leamington.
Recently, student landlords have been creeping into the new build market by the backdoor by seeking planning for blocks of minute studio flats. Although not qualifying as student accommodation in planning terms, they are already being marketed as such. It doesn’t require much intelligence to realise that only temporary inhabitants of this town would consider living in such restricted spaces. We need homes not hutches.
Why is our Council failing us so badly? One possible explanation might be that its Executive doesn’t contain one Leamington councillor. Despite Leamington being by far the most populous town in the District, we are being presided over by an Executive exclusively representing those who live outside it. Perhaps they simply don’t care. Away from the all-night parties and the vermin, the parking problems and the community transmission of Covid19, Councillor Andrew Day is enjoying his rural idyll in Bishops Tatchbrook. Perhaps we can find him a broom cupboard in an HMO in CV32, so he can experience the phenomenon for himself!
