When all the students come back

Well , who is looking forward to the students returning to their uni towns? I will tell you who: university finance departments, landlords and ladies, Sainsbury’s. Once this list would have included bars and pubs, and local shops. Once it would be local residents looking forward to new trends in music and art, and even philosophical debates down the Royal Park Pub. Most, if not all university lectures can be online. Practicals obviously need equipment, but possibly students could to access that at a local home university. Quite this a drastic step I realise. This would involve cooperation between institutions, but hey, this is a global pandemic, but I say where there’s a will... It seems that the exasperated parents have already dropped off and got rid of the most determinedly antisocial partygoers, probably a thousand or so, given the reports we have from Moorland Avenue, Saint John’s Avenue, Hyde Park Road, Cardigan Road, the Norwoods, Victoria Road, the Broomfields, the Langdales. But many more thousands are set to descend on the city. We hear of one uni has actually asking students to come back early. Is to this ensure they will get their fees, or to get them inside the city boundary before lockdowns return? Hopefully these are students who have come here to study. Nonetheless they will have been looking forward to freedom, freshers week and meeting up with old friends. To have them all descend on Leeds at once is the recipe for an almighty spike and heaven help the students and the unis when they get the blame for Leeds’s first football game in the Premier League to be behind closed doors and when all the pubs get closed again. We suggest that the council and the universities get together, be creative and come up with an intelligent plan.

What are the Lettings Agents' Responsibilities when their Tenants Take Anti-social Behaviour to these Heights?

This is us at Moorland Residents Inc writing to the letting agents, wondering what their role would be regarding their tenants and their tenants' behaviour. 

We are writing to you as you are the letting agent for a number of multiple occupancy houses in the area.

As you may be aware from local newspapers [Yorkshire Evening Post, Leeds Live, Radio Aire], a number of students are regularly hosting loud parties, often starting in the afternoon and continuing into the early hours of the morning. This has been going on years at the weekends, but the parties and attendant anti-social behaviour escalated at the beginning of June when students who had left Leeds at the beginning of lockdown returned to their student accommodation.

The anti-social behaviour includes hiring sound systems, partying in the gardens and in the streets, stealing wood to burn and chairs to sit on from other houses. It includes overt drug taking and excessive alcohol consumption, and screeching with laughter until 6am.

Apart from the partying the students leave the bins in streets, overflowing, with no differentiation between recycling and landfill rubbish, and this rubbish includes glass bottles. The state of the bins encourages rats, invites the regular fly-tipping of white goods and broken furniture, some brought out from the HMOs themselves.

The noise levels are at the worst they have ever been. Longterm local residents are suffering from the psychological and physical effects of sleep deprivation, made worse by the fact that many residents are having to work from home. Plus some students are ignoring rules regarding social distancing and limited numbers in houses. In some instances, they are also causing property damage to the houses they are renting.

Since March 23rd the police have acted on multiple noise disturbance and lockdown breaches, and then on July 1st, the Council brought in a Public Space Protection Order and I’m reporting a breach of this PSPO at [as well as instances of flytipping. This has made the area unsightly and created health risks.

To make matters worse, some students have come already come back to Leeds, almost as if for a holiday. They are certainly not working themselves, and the universities aren’t back yet.

While the police can act on breaches as they occur, we would like to know how yourselves as letting agents will act to ensure that PSPO orders are obeyed as well as dealing with repeated breaches. Besides impacting on the health of residents, the breaches are damaging the resident-student relationship and the marketability of the properties themselves. We residents are keen to restore good relationships with student occupants but in order to do this, steps do have to be taken to resolve the problems caused by non-compliant individuals.

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