Micro-life for students

A house of multiple occupation, or HMO, is a house where several people live together as either tenants or lodgers.  Where the landlord also resides in the house, then the paying residents are termed lodgers; otherwise they are tenants.  The paying residents each have a room to themselves, and share communal rooms such as the kitchen, bathroom, and maybe a lounge.

Tenants have more legal rights than lodgers, who have almost no legal rights worth speaking of.

Two recent news items concern such dwellings.  The first is about a young student who was lodging in London, and caught her landlord entering her room without permission.  The comments are divided as to whether or not the landlord was acting legally.

The other is about the impact which HMOs tend to have upon the surrounding area and its other residents.  This quote from a man in Leeds is worth noting:

HMOs started to crop up in the Nineties when universities expanded as the Labour government pumped money in. No one gave any thought to where these students would live.

So too is this quote from a lawyer:

We just don’t have enough houses. HMOs are a response to the fact that lots and lots of people have nowhere to live.

I have lived as a lodger myself, and it would be easy for me to argue for strict laws protecting the welfare of lodgers, but then I reflect that it is not always easy to have a stranger living in your home.  Surely the best solution would be for the government to make it easier for people to have somewhere to live without having to lodge in someone else’s home.

The last Labour government made clear its ambition to have fifty percent of all school leavers go to university, but failed to provide an adequate explanation as to why this ambition was desirable.  One of its many consequences was to inflate the demand for housing near to universities- and yet this Labour government won three consecutive general elections.

Maybe it would make sense for people to stop voting for politicians who have illogical obsessions, and instead vote for politicians who have a sensible housing policy.

Related previous posts include:
Micro-life
Do we need universities?