The Round Hill Society

Student Community Liaison

From The Round Hill Reporter December 2014.

Issues and opportunities

At our committee meeting in November we met Andrew Keeffe, the University of Brighton Community Liaison and Housing Advice Officer. His job has two roles, and the first he described was related to building links between the city and the university. To this end he told us that we might be able to tap into a supply of student volunteers to help us with community events such as Playsafe and community clean- ups. Whilst this may be a useful option for a source of labour, it would be better, from a community point of view, to get on so well with the students living on Round Hill that we can involve them – resident students – in our community activities.

Andrew’s second function is to address issues arising from students living in the community – many of these relate to the work of letting agents. Andrew noted that absolutely anyone can set up as a letting agent, there are no professional qualifications and no compulsory codes of conduct. Perhaps it is not surprising that they often seem to do the minimum of work in addressing housing quality and condition issues suffered by students. This paper has previously reported on work being done by Brighton University Student Union and others to draw attention to tenants’ rights, and show up some of the worst agents (see page 7 of issue 56, on the roundhill.org.uk website). The Society is still looking at ways it might get involved in a project which might result in an improvement of some of the ‘to let’ housing on the hill (see for example the ‘in Bloom’ article on page 5).

The issue that resident’s may feel most strongly about is student houses which generate noise, or fail to manage their waste and recycling effectively. Andrew finds this occupies more of his time at the beginning of term, and he suggests that neighbours respond quickly and calmly to an issue, trying to encourage understanding and reasonable behaviour. Many residents have found an even better approach, to introduce themselves to the new occupants as soon as they arrive, to offer help, loans of equipment that might be lacking, and advice on refuse and recycling. But if all that fails then Andrew is there to help. Find contact details for him and his Sussex University equivalent on page 8. Ideally Andrew would like to know which university the students are attending, or the name of the managing agent, but he will help without this information. Noise is a Local Authority issue but, as Andrew noted, Environmental Health staff are being lost as Government funding is cut, and the process of keeping a noise diary can be very offputting, and may be the wrong solution when a very loud and late party is going on. Even though it’s an annual event it’s best to meet you neighbours early, and build a good relationship.