“How are you?” I asked my son, towards the middle of his second term at the University of Hull. “Hungry,” he replied. Further inquiries revealed that he was attempting to subsist on the one meal a day provided by his hall of residence, having run out of money for food. “But what of our careful budgeting plan, painstakingly worked out before you started your first year in September?” I wailed. Had he overspent on beer? Clubbing? Online gambling?
No. It transpired that there was one major outgoing that we’d omitted to consider when deciding how he should spend the £75 a week left over from his living loan once he’d paid his accommodation, one that had blown all our calculations completely out of the water: disciplinary fines.
So far, he has been fined £300 — the equivalent of four weeks-worth of living costs — for smoking in his bedroom and for disabling the smoke alarm, with a further £380 suspended fine that will be called in should he breach any other rules. Friends in his hall have been fined for anything from playing music too loud to leaving a mess in the kitchen. When I asked him to work out the total fines paid so far by just his hallmates, he reached more than £2,000 before giving up.
His isn’t an isolated case. In February 2012, a group of students at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, lodged complaints about what they deemed excessive penalties meted out by the junior deans. The year before, an Oxford student was fined £78 for storing a hay bale in her room. In March 2012, the University of Surrey’s newspaper, The Stag, claimed the university had made more than £500,000 in fines over the past five years, with residential fines showing the largest proportional increase. Online student forums regularly host threads complaining of over-zealous fining, with groups of students often fined collectively for damage to communal property when no one culprit is found. Library fines generate the most revenue, with UK universities raising almost £50 million in six years from overdue books.
Nobody disputes there have to be rules — and consequences when those rules are broken. But surely these sorts of fines on near-penniless students are disproportionately draconian? Why not impose some form of community service? Bathroom-cleaning, manning helplines, clearing litter?
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When I e-mailed the registar at Hull to raise questions about how students are fined and how the money is spent, she replied that the Data Protection Act prohibited her from discussing my son’s case, although she would “look into” the idea of community service.
As universities prepare to hike their fees to £9,000 a year, they need to be able to justify every penny they take from cash-strapped students and can ill afford any suggestion of stealth-taxing those with the least deep pockets.