Manchester Students Shocked After Being Offered Halls In Liverpool

Students at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) have been left shocked after being offered halls accommodation in cities up to 30 miles away.

This month will see many thousands of UK students heading off to university, with many moving to a completely new city, or even country (check out our guide to studying abroad).

But for those attending Manchester’s largest university, it seems things may not have gone quite to plan.

According to the Manchester Evening News (MEN), MMU is currently experiencing a bit of an ‘accommodation crisis’ as ‘significantly more offer-holders than anticipated’ are expecting to attend the university.

 As a result, MMU says it has been forced to offer some students ‘temporary options’ for accommodation in cities and towns across the north including Liverpool and Huddersfield.

Students waiting for accommodation to be allocated received a message on the university’s portal explaining the issue and were offered residence at halls that MMU said were just ‘a short distance away’, assuring them that the temporary halls are around a ’15 minute walk’ from a train station where they can then get a 40-minute train to Manchester.

The university has said it will give £100 a week to cover the additional living and travelling expenses incurred, however one student who has been offered the temporary accommodation told the MEN ‘no one really knows what’s going on’ and ‘the communication has been awful’.

“We only found this out yesterday because we’ve been told to wait for days,” the student said. “But obviously we weren’t expecting them to come out with a whole new city and offer us that, so it was a surprise.”

The university confirmed that the issue is affecting around 2% of undergraduate students planning to start in September, with a spokesperson for MMU saying: “Manchester is an incredibly popular student city and there is significant demand for accommodation.

“We have offered places to our target student numbers this year and planned our accommodation based on long-term experience of how many of those offers are likely to be accepted, while also building in a considerable cushion - however, significantly more offer-holders than anticipated have been accepting and meeting the conditions of our offer.

“While we continue to work hard to secure accommodation for them in the city region, we are now providing temporary options with our private hall partners in Liverpool and Huddersfield.

“We will cover travel costs to Manchester for any students who take up this offer.

“We know that this will be disappointing for them, and we are doing everything we can to find them to rooms in Manchester as soon as we can.”

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