Housing minister Paul McLennan will be presented with an open letter signed by student leaders and officers from across Scotland urging him to take action to ensure students and apprentices are not “left out in the cold”. 

Set to take place on Thursday 14th at 1pm, the rally marks the climax of an activist-led week that the Scottish Student Movement is calling National Student Housing Week. Students’ unions and associations across campuses are uniting to spotlight the urgent challenges students face in the rental market.

Specifically, NUS Scotland and supporters are calling for rent controls and tenant protection regulations to be applied to purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) on an equal basis to the private rented sector, and for it to be made illegal for landlords to require tenants to have a UK-based guarantor who either owns property or earns over a certain amount of money.

On the same day, NUS UK will release the full results of a survey into students and apprentices’ experience of the housing system, which includes key findings that over a third of students (36%) have had difficulty paying their housing costs and consequently two-fifths of those respondents have gone without heating (39%) and 17% have used a foodbank. These figures are even higher in Scotland with 19% of respondents stating they’ve had to use a foodbank and over 56% skipping a meal in order to pay housing costs.

Another finding indicates that 60% of student renters were required to obtain a guarantor and that over a third (36%) said the process of doing so caused them a great deal of stress. Again, this figure is even higher in Scotland with over two-fifths of respondents stating that the process of securing a guarantor was stressful.

NUS Scotland president Sai Shraddha S. Viswanathan said: “Students and apprentices from across Scotland will be rallying outside the parliament in Holyrood to ensure that the Scottish Government doesn’t leave us out in the cold.

“The housing bill being debated is a strong first step to tackling Scotland’s housing emergency but there are currently loopholes and blind spots which disadvantage students and apprentices and risk undermining the bill’s effectiveness.

“As we unveil the full results of NUS’ housing research, we are hopeful that politicians will take heed of the harm failing to abolish guarantors or to regulate student accommodation will have.

“If the Scottish Government wants to demonstrate that they truly care about the wellbeing of students and apprentices, they must listen to our calls and fix student housing.

“When rent and housing costs are so unaffordable that after paying them almost a fifth of students are having to resort to using foodbanks there is no excuse for us to be treated as an afterthought.”