A university official said that not all noisy young people were students as she and a colleague were asked about student housing in Brighton and Hove.
Sue Baxter, director of innovation and business partnerships at Sussex, said that the university investigated complaints of anti-social behaviour by students living off the Falmer campus.
She was responding to a question by Green councillor Sue Shanks at a meeting of the Greater Brighton Economic Board yesterday (Tuesday 18 July).
Dr Baxter said: “I know there has been a lot of concern about students taking family housing and some of the anti-social behaviour sometimes associated with that.
“Quite often, when we look into it, it’s not actually students in those shared houses. It’s just young people – automatically assumed to be in the student bracket.”
She added: “We are trying to get more on top of how we handle this.”
Councillor Shanks, who serves on Brighton and Hove City Council, said that there was a need for “all sorts” of student digs to free up family homes.
She said: “I thought after the pandemic that people might have decided to stay more locally at home. But it seems there is still a demand to go away – and I wondered what the plans are?”
She was told that the university continued to build more student homes on its campus.
Dr Baxter and Debbie Keeling, the university’s deputy pro-vice chancellor, presented a recently published report to the Greater Brighton Economic Board at the AgriFood Centre at Plumpton Agricultural College.
The board is made of political leaders, business bosses and education chiefs.
They were told that an independent report found that Sussex University was worth £495 million to the economy and supported thousands of jobs, with a growing number of students volunteering in the community.
The Oxford Economics report said that the university directly added about £207 million of value to the economy, with £75 million generated through its supply chain and wage spending.
Spending by students and visitors contributed a further £147 million to GDP (gross domestic product).
The university supported more than 7,800 jobs in 2020-21 – at the height of the coronavirus pandemic – and boosted hundreds of businesses, many of them local.
In the 2020-21 academic year, 7,147 individuals graduated, compared with 7,120 in 2018-19.
More than a quarter of the university’s 2018-19 graduates who were in work were employed in Greater Brighton, East Sussex and West Sussex 15 months after graduation.
Of these, 40 per cent were employed in “socially significant” roles, including as teachers, social workers and doctors.
So students are employed as doctors ?
In a sense, yes.
The longer answer is even when qualifying after a medicine degree, you spend the next couple of years as a junior doctor, which is the bottom of the chain, you still have lots to learn.
And at £13 an hour, and with working every hour under the sun, living together is a very logical thing to do.
Whilst we the residents appreciate the contribution to the economy that students provide. I blame the council for allowing student houses in areas where there are workers.
Zoning would be useful and could be achieved using census data, but no, they would rather let us put up with the racket and often abuse that residents receive at the hands of student houses.
Personally, I report any noise instantly as in the past I have found silence and suffering achieve nothing.
This city definitely prioritise student needs above residents. I can’t wait to get out of here and take my NHS job with me. I’m not alone and would appreciate someone from the council actually listening to residential concerns.
The article states these are not always or even often students. They are just young people. Young people have jobs, Helen. Young people are in the worker bracket.
With the green’s unilaterally turning the Lewes Rd into ‘an academic corridor’, the balance of families, older people and students was purposely disrupted in an attempt to gerrymander as many naive young people into Caroline Lucases constituency.
Noise, pollution and drug dealing meant that after 40 years we set out West for new pastures. It does give me pleasure though to think of Phelim sitting in his damp bed sit wondering where it all went wrong though🤣
It’s easy to spot the student HMOs:
1) The hugely prominent Brand Vaughn Student toilet sign left permanently outside the house.
2) The partying goes on all night – Young People with jobs have to get up in the morning.
3) Large amounts of refuse left out on the pavement by the absentee landlord after the end of the summer term.
As a young person born and raised in Brighton I’m sick of being referred to as a student with the implication being that I don’t actually belong here or am some kind of parasite.
Why are the University investigating anti social behaviour off campus? The agency with statutory responsibility for dealing with noise nuisance is the Council and any behaviour that is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress is a criminal offence and should be investigated by the Police. Can any business impartially investigate their own customers? The council should be providing data on ASB, data that could then be fact checked, not a third party organisation marking their own homework. The University have a social responsibility if their customers are causing ASB in the local community for sure- wouldn’t some financial support for the statutory agencies be more beneficial and appropriate?