When thinking about how the Budget affects us as students, it’s often easier to look out for sweeping changes to student financing arrangements if we want a quick assessment of how we might fare when the policies kick in. But strangely enough, that policy area was broadly left alone this Autumn, begging the question whether it had any meaningful impact on the student population whatsoever.
The scope of a Budget is, of course, larger than any handful of measures. This time around, the Treasury has pulled policy levers notably diverging in scale, from the most distant of wonk-ish reviews and reports to immediate multi-billion-pound cash injections into UK-wide public spending and tax cuts, and at least some of these are bound to affect students.
According to this year’s edition of the NatWest Student Living Index, one of the biggest commonalities amongst students is how much they frequent pubs, at a rate of 80%. Despite there being no change to headline alcohol duty, the potential for increases in running costs, such as rent being passed onto punters, was a concern for publicans ahead of the Budget, facing tighter margins overall, exacerbated by what they believe to be disproportionate business rates.
The Chancellor, in response, announced a revaluation of leisure, hospitality, and retail property set to decrease business rates across the board, created a new lower rate, a two-year extension of discounted rates for small businesses opening a new location, and a £4.3 billion support package for locations experiencing bill hikes despite their reduced rent. For the many students who provide steady custom to the nightlife industry up and down the country, in this climate, we may rest assured that our favourite dives are here to stay, and hopefully they won’t feel the need to push pints above a fiver.
Socialising is not the be-all and end-all of student life and, particularly at this time of year, many of us will be thinking train travel as we often return home, with just under two-thirds of the 2023 intake being intent on living independently while at university and one in five of all who did head back for Christmas in 2020 being reliant on the rail network, not to mention the remaining third who wanted to primarily commute to campus who likely are, too.
While too late for the upcoming holidays, the government’s decision to “freeze” rail fares for a year from March, leaving their price unadjusted to let inflation reduce their real-terms cost, will provide a level of predictability in budgeting travel expenses as well as an overall cheapening across the period. Direct interventions in pricing like this have, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s companion report, contributed to a reduction in consumer goods and services inflation to the tune of 0.3 percentage points – the largest ever from government policy alone outside of an economic crisis. This should help keep costs down for the majority of the student population who can’t make their funds last a full term.
If one is to interpret these efforts from the Chancellor to be, as she claims, a Budget “to cut the cost of living”, we must also look at the road less travelled – more specifically, that of the metropolitan mayors. While Reeves in her inaugural address last year capped bus fees at £3 through to March 2027, it was undercut at inception by the £2 cap introduced by the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, which has been in force since 2022 and the Conservative-administered scheme in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough which has provided a more generous £1 cap available only to under-25s.
This isn’t to say that the Budget measures are mutually exclusive to support offered regionally, though they do create an element of contestation between regions that can offer better value to their student population, which, after all, is what students prioritise the most when applying. In the national context of widespread subsidy and an environment in which students opt for enjoyment as much as career prospects, the relative value-for-money of the “Red Brick” university experience over the ancients of Scotland and the South of England could further balloon the student numbers of universities like our own.
