Unfinished building work results in freshers placed into temporary accommodation

Students hoping to live in newly built accommodations on College Lane have been told, less than a month before they were due to move in, that they would have to live in temporary accommodation due to halls not quite being finished in time for arrivals weekend. Most students who will be doing so, have now moved into these temporary accommodations.

The University of Hertfordshire has made significant investments over the past few years to deliver 2500 new rooms and 500 refurbished rooms to College Lane in a programme that finishes in September 2016. Of that, according to Andrew May, Director of Estates at the University, “almost 1500 [new rooms] have been successfully delivered and all 500 have been refurbished.

What we are trying to deliver for this year [September 2015],” May informed UniVerse, “is very very roughly about 1000 rooms.

To date, slightly under a quarter of the rooms have not been finished: “About 770 have been successfully delivered and the remaining 230 will be finished in about a week or two.”

Of the approximately 230 students who do not have their new rooms finished; May stated, “[They] will be moving into the existing halls that we had not demolished… Broad and Coales Halls,” both of which are on the same campus. May said that they were going to stay there for a “week or two.”

However, UniVerse has received prior reports from students , now living in Coales, claiming: “They told me one to four weeks.” …

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