Student housing – Codes of Management Practice

This is the second post inspired by the HousingView Team(the very brilliant Justin Bates and Andrew Dymond) which produce a weekly newsletter about housing law and which also carries news about Welsh housing law (sign up here).

This one is about the WG consultation document about student housing (Comments by 27th August 2025)  This is really interesting and not just because I have a significant research interest in this area.  The thing to remember about this is that, if you are able to sign up to one of the two voluntary codes, you are exempt from the health and safety rules which apply to everybody else living in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).  HMOs generally are regarded as some of the most hazardous places to live.  The (now old) LACORS guidance document recognises that “HMOs often provide accommodation for people from a wide range of backgrounds and may house vulnerable or disadvantaged groups. In some HMOs there is a high occupancy turnover rate with little social interaction or cohesion between occupiers. The mix of often poor-quality, low-cost housing and vulnerable occupants can lead to a higher than normal fire risk” (para 7.1).  HMO licensing is designed to improve safety in those buildings.

In the UK government’s Housing Act 2004, student housing is exempted from those regs provided that the provider signs up to an approved code of practice.  The WG has recognised that its regulations in this area, which were made in 2006, have rather been superseded by updated codes of practice.  These codes of practice are approved by the government but are essentially set up, run by, and managed by private third sector organisations.  There are two such documents which the WG is consulting on whether it is appropriate to approve: the Universities UK/Guild of Higher Education Accommodation Code of Practice for Student Housing; and the ANUK /Unipol Code of Standards for Larger Residential Developments.

In this post, I am not going to discuss the standards in those codes, nor their enforcement (both of which, however, are of interest).  The more important question I am going to address is what types of property they cover.  This depends on the identity of the provider which manages and/or controls the building (s. 263, Housing Act 2004).  By sch 14, para 4(1), the following is exempt from the HMO licensing regime:

Any building—

(a) which is occupied solely or principally by persons who occupy it for the purpose of undertaking a full-time course of further or higher education at a specified educational establishment or at an educational establishment of a specified description, and

(b) where the person managing or having control of it is the educational establishment in question or a specified person or a person of a specified description.

The problem is that this is a sector with so many hybrid types of arrangements, governed by a diverse (and not particularly boilerplated) set of contracts in buildings which are build under wildly differing sets of arrangements with or without the University’s buy-in but over which the University might have a set proportion of nomination rights.  If you are getting the complexity of this, then also recognise that this is a highly financialised sector with money leveraged from Canadian pension schemes to Saudi Arabian state funds.  All of this was captured in the title of a brilliant piece of academic writing, “Beds for rent“.

How do the codes work out whether the provider can be approved by them?  They both use a framework to establish management and/or control as follows:

12 questions are asked: the answer can be yes, responsible, no, not responsible or both are responsible.  The answer to each question attracts the number of points, as follows:
Marketing – 1 point
Rent Collection – 1 point
Occupancy Agreement – 6 points
Hard [Facilities Management] – 2 points
Soft [Facilities Management]:
Cleaning – 1 point
Security – 1 point
Repairs – 1 point
Health and Safety Routines – 1 point
Out of Hours Services – 1 point
Residential Relations – 2 points
Residential Cover – 1 point
The points are loaded to reflect the importance of each item as determining control and management.  There are a total of 18 points in all.  The headings are scored according to an educational establishment or another provider. Whoever has the higher score determines who has control and management of the building.  For the purposes of determining eligibility to sign this particular Code, the educational establishment must have the higher score.

I love lists like this and the responses (ie yes, no, both) because there aren’t really any absolutes in this sector, and, of course, these kinds of lists can be gamed.  It appears – but others may know better – that providers self-assess against that list and it is unclear whether the Code operator itself has any oversight of that self-assessment or whether it is subject to any verification.  The WG write in their consultation, not unreasonably, that “The codes were widely consulted on during their development and as such the Welsh Minsters are not consulting on the content of the codes and are instead consulting on their proposal to approve them.”

Perhaps they may wish to ask the question, though, about whether there is assessment of the providers’ status?  Given the risks in HMOs and the fact that private financialised providers are not unknown for seeking profit and cutting corners to make it, this is a bit of a significant issue.