Government reforms of the private rented sector threaten to make it harder for students to enter higher education.

This is the view of the National Residential Landlords Association and organisations from across the higher education sector, set out in a letter to ministers responsible for private housing and for higher education.

The Government White Paper on rental reform proposes that all student housing, with the exception of purpose-built blocks, would be subject to open-ended tenancies. This means that unless sitting tenants have handed in their notice to leave, landlords will be unable to guarantee their accommodation will be available for the start of the next academic year. As a result, students looking for housing will be unable to plan in advance where they want to live and with whom, the letter from the NRLA, Universities UK and the British Property Federation pointed out.

Without certainty about the availability of housing ‘there is likely to be a significant reduction in available accommodation at a time when demand is growing’, it said.

‘A shortage of this accommodation has already led some academic institutions to call for a limit to be placed on student intakes for as long as the next five years.

‘The proposed introduction of open-ended tenancies and inevitable reduction in housing supply is therefore likely to further constrain the expansion of the education sector, to the detriment of prospective students and wider society’.

The organisations have called on the Government to extend the exemption from open-ended tenancies granted to purpose-built student accommodation to all student housing. They argue that where a landlord rents a property to a group of students, a fixed term tenancy agreement should be permissible.

The groups go on to call for measures to allow student landlords to give two months’ notice to repossess a property when it is needed for incoming students. In order to provide protections for incoming students, they propose that such notice should only be given during the final two months of a tenancy agreement.