Huge student blocks are transforming city skylines. But is there a darker motive behind the boom?

There’s a rumour going around Cardiff. As gleaming new blocks of student flats spring up, transforming the Welsh capital’s skyline, some say there’s a hidden motive at play. Developers are taking advantage of looser rules to throw the private halls up, with the aim of converting the buildings to flats down the line. 

Back in 2019, one councillor described the schemes as “a cynical use of the planning process” and “nothing less than a commercial development through the back door”. Or as a less diplomatic Reddit commenter put it: “Oh please Mr Council! We can’t seem to rent the rooms for some unknown reason! Please, please, please! Let us rent them to non-students or we will go bust,” going on to add it was “another nice little scam from the corrupt money grabbers”. 

Developers don’t have to pay section 106 contributions, intended to boost the council’s coffers to pay for things like affordable housing, the idea goes. Get the flats approved, get them up, and it’s an easy way of building flats you wouldn’t be able to build otherwise. 

The idea persists. Graham Getheridge, the chair of Atlantic Wharf Residents’ Association, who are objecting to one planned block in the city, explained the rumour to Big Issue: “If you build student accommodation, they’re exempt [from section 106]. And then what they go for is change of use. Funny enough, a year after. But I’m assured this isn’t the case, and that this isn’t happening. But there is that rumour going around.” 

It even came up at Big Issue’s Big Debate in Cardiff back in May, as panellists chewed over the impact of the blocks on the city. 

There’s just one problem: it’s never actually happened. 

Big Issue has trawled through student-related planning applications lodged in the past five years in Cardiff – while temporary changes of use have been granted in some cases, to rent empty rooms during summer months, no permanent changes have been granted. Cardiff Council confirm they have never granted such a permission. With an eye to the future, however, the council asks developers to consider what converting the flats might look like. It’s possible the rumour traces back to 2018, when the council gave permission for Park Lane Student Living to be converted to ‘aparthotels’ – but this is the only permanent change on record since then, and not in a purpose-built building.

But what has happened is more interesting – and has nationwide implications for skylines and bottom lines.

For students, the private halls frenzy has changed the nature of university and seen their studies become profitable for big investors. But are these students given the same rights as others? For residents of cities like Cardiff, the blocks transform the local environment. Questions over hidden motives and sustainability naturally follow. And for taxpayers and voters across the country, these private halls stand as a symptom of the international student boom on which Keir Starmer’s government has recently launched a crackdown, with big implications for one of the UK’s leading industries. 

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The ‘crack cocaine’ of international students 

Purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA), to use its technical name, is a booming business. In 2024 alone, £3.87 billion was invested in freshly built private halls in the UK, up 14% in a single year, with more than 16,000 beds delivered. Private halls account for 81% of student accommodation built in 2024. The supply of beds is expected to grow by nearly a quarter by 2028, estimates StuRents. 

The halls are typically occupied by international students, able to afford inflated tuition fees as well as more expensive accommodation. In Cardiff, as elsewhere, these students are a financial crutch for universities. 

The total number of students across the city’s three universities – Cardiff University, Cardiff Met and the University of South Wales (USW) – has stayed steady from 2018 to 2024, hovering just below 70,000. Yet that masks a deeper trend. 

Cardiff Met and USW, the city’s former polytechnics, have become increasingly reliant on the money of international students, Big Issue analysis has found. In 2018, fees from non-UK students made up 21% of Cardiff Met’s fees income. By 2024, the most recent year of data, that had risen to 30% – an increase of 50%. For USW, the slice of the pie has doubled – whereas international students accounted for 19% of fees income in 2018, in 2024 they made up 40%. Or as Dylan Jones-Evans, who was a university professor for 27 years, said at Big Issue’s Big Debate: “Our university sector has tended to hook itself on what I call the crack cocaine of international students.” 

This has fuelled demand for PBSA. Blocks with names like Zenith and Prime Student Living have popped up. Look at any one of the brand-new buildings on the city’s skyline and there’s a fair chance someone’s stressing about their dissertation inside. 

The fuss over Cardiff’s PBSA boom reached a head in 2019, and the pandemic cast doubt over the future of the blocks. But building has not ground to a halt: Big Issue’s planning trawl shows rooms for 1,299 students have been approved in the past year alone. At least 158 further beds could soon be approved. 

A lack of protection for students 

For the students who do fill the halls, their rights are uneven. Labour is introducing big reforms to renters’ rights, but some key aspects will not apply to students living in these halls. 

In England, the government is carving out a PBSA-specific exemption to the new Renters’ Rights Bill which will exempt the blocks from the new decent homes standard. Instead, providers will be expected to sign up to codes of practice, and forced to conform to the decent homes standard only after persistent breaches, housing minister Matthew Pennycook said in December. Under the decent homes standard, local authorities can fine landlords up to £40,000. 

“There often isn’t really a remedy for a student who complains about a breach of the code. They can make a complaint, but an accommodation provider’s failure to comply with the code does not in itself give rise to a right to compensation or a legal claim in court,” said Robin Stewart, a partner at Anthony Gold solicitors. 

Here, however, Wales diverges: the Welsh government plans to make developers build student halls to social housing standards. 

PBSA providers in England will also keep the ability to set fixed-term contracts. This, argues Guy Morris of Flat Justice, a company which helps students get rent back from unlicensed blocks, will leave residents in a vulnerable position. 

“The problems we’ve seen students have had are obvious when they move into the flat. There’s nothing they can do about it, they’re fixed into their contract for a year and they can’t get out of it,” said Morris. 

“They rely on a new cohort of students coming in every year who know nothing about the problems and then get signed up for another year and stuck in the same substandard accommodation.” 

The cash cows are leaving 

Julie James MS, the Welsh government’s minister for delivery, told the audience at Big Issue’s Big Debate cities are experiencing “studentification”, and “students are cash cows, the universities see them as cash cows but so do developers”. 

But the cash cows are already slipping away. Cardiff Met saw its number of international students almost halve in a single year from 2023 to 2024, robbing it of nearly £10 million in fees income. USW saw numbers decrease slightly in the same year. And Cardiff University’s numbers have been trending downwards since 2019.  

Labour estimates its immigration reforms, designed to reduce net migration, will mean the UK’s universities have around 30,000 fewer international students each year. Universities UK has warned the measures will make the sector’s funding crisis “considerably worse”. 

Facing a more than £31m deficit, Cardiff University is embarking on a bitterly-contested round of job cuts, and plans to close five schools including nursing, ancient history and music. Nationally, there is talk of letting universities go bust. And if a university disappears, what happens to the apartment blocks and the cities they’ve transformed? 

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