Just over a week ago the tech start-up I co-founded was presenting at the Advertising, Media and Marketing Fair in the Town Hall. From Amazon to Saatchi, companies piled up mounds of food and freebies trying to attract the best and brightest to their stalls. Go for the biscuits, stay for the grad scheme – so we hoped.
What always strikes me about these events is the enormous food wastage. Those mounds of leftover muffins, Jaffa Cakes and oranges standing half-excavated on tables and destined straight for the bin as the day draws to an end. This is astonishing even by Oxford’s standards – the city ranks fourth in the country for homelessness and the number of food banks in recent years has jumped from 29 to 251. Going on about homelessness and food banks to students tends to draw unflattering comparisons with the people standing around Piccadilly Circus yelling that the “End is Nigh” so not to waste a good PR opportunity we decided to gather up the leftover food and take it over to the Oxford Gatehouse homeless centre on Woodstock Road.
Asking for leftovers from pampered graduate recruitment officers at Ogilvy wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined I’d be doing four months after graduating from Oxford, but it got the job done. We gathered juices, baked goods, Haribo sweets (given to us begrudgingly because HR might need them for the next event), fruit and every variety of biscuits.
The Gatehouse greeted our start-up’s delegation warmly and accepted the donation. Dean, who helps to run the drop-in centre, told us that their work seldom receives coverage in the student press and so they get few student volunteers. Perhaps this isn’t entirely surprising given how full most peoples’ academic/social calendars get, but still that’s little comfort.
Food waste at the Advertising, Media and Marketing Fair however is just a small example of the way that we under-utilise our resources at university. In both my second and third year I lived out of college and was astonished by the inefficiency of the housing model. In Oxford and indeed throughout the UK, students renting privately are forced into 12-month contracts despite the fact that they live and study in their university cities for 6 months of the year. There are about 10,000 students living out in Oxford. Their rooms stand empty during Christmas and Easter holidays, not to mention over those long summer months. This represents £3,000 in wasted rent each year for the average student and does nothing to help Oxford’s reputation as the least affordable city in the UK.
The length of rental contracts is unlikely to change any time soon, especially while students continue to queue overnight to sign up to them. Legislative changes announced in the April 2015 Budget, however, would make it easier for students to make use of their empty spaces through subletting. This will not only help to increase the supply of medium-term housing but will also help to reduce the rising costs of student living. The legislation is by no means sufficient or the unequivocal answer to the housing problem. It is however a step in the right direction that will help us to use our resources more effectively.
If nothing else, it’s also a sign that some solutions to our everyday problems are closer to home.
