Hundreds of Manchester students are refusing to pay their rent this month. We met them
‘I think there is a lot of greed at the top of universities. I think people are willing to let students suffer’
Good afternoon Millers — yesterday was a day of reports; hefty, serious reports. One of them finds that the government’s “levelling up” programme “is now on life support” — more on that in our news briefing below. The other, from a leading committee of MPs, sounds the alarm about the worrying state of local journalism in this country.
Fear not: If reports aren’t what you’re in the mood for, Mollie has filed a great piece (that bit of the edition is members-only) about students at the University of Manchester who have turned off their direct debits this month as part of a coordinated “rent strike.” “Nobody in the world should be paying five grand a year for somewhere with mould and rats and silverfish and roofs collapsing and piles of dead wasps,” one student tells her, showing her around his substandard room.
First, that parliamentary report. “MPs have accused the UK’s biggest local news publishers of ‘compromising the quality’ of their journalism in a new report on the sustainability of local journalism,” reports Press Gazette. After conducting an inquiry into the sector, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee notes the “damaging decline” in standards — but mentions The Mill and a few other independent publications as a sign of hope for the future.
Here’s a key paragraph from the report:
With falling revenues, local news publishers are left with fewer resources to conduct effective journalism, and the quality of the stories they publish and their relevance to local communities can decline. The economics of digital advertising may contribute to this trend, as sensationalised news content designed to drive visits to a publisher’s website (“clickbait”) is incentivised to increase revenue.
The report is a remarkable read — particularly in the bluntness of its language about what is going wrong. Mill readers will be well aware of these issues because we talk about them often. But it’s still eye-opening to see a parliamentary committee making the same points we’ve been banging on about — and criticising the big companies that control most local newspapers so bluntly.
A senior executive at Reach Plc, the giant London-based company that owns the MEN and dozens of other titles, responded to the report by saying: “we are concerned about the unfounded comments on the quality of local journalism and a somewhat puritan view of public interest journalism.”
There’s some positive stuff in the report too, and it even mentions us. “We have encountered many new local news publishers with a variety of innovative business models, demonstrating that the sector has a sustainable future if it is properly supported to adapt to the new market,” the MPs write. “The Mill is a newspaper covering Greater Manchester, founded in 2020. It publishes free content via a Substack mailing list, with further content for subscribers, who pay £7 per month. It raises additional revenue from partnership-based advertising with local businesses. The paper has recently launched two similar newsletters in Sheffield (The Tribune) and Liverpool (The Post).”
What a week — Radio 4 and a parliamentary committee. Any more endorsements by pillars of the Establishment and we’ll be in danger of losing our gritty startup credibility.
If you missed it, yesterday’s members-only edition had a great headline (“Why is your cash-strapped local council buying your failing local shopping centre?”) and an even better piece, in which we asked a former council leader to explain why on earth local authorities are buying malls across Greater Manchester when the private sector has clearly given up on them. If you’re not a member yet, join up to read that and get all our members-only reporting, which accounts for well over half of what we publish.
Your Mill briefing
Northern leaders have said they want levelling up to be enshrined in law. At the Convention of the North yesterday, mayors and council leaders said the concept of levelling up should be “hard-wired” into the British system so that areas have the freedom to spend money in the best interests of their residents rather than forcing councils to bid for pots of money from the government. It comes a week after the latest batch of levelling up funding was released, with the bidding process described as a “broken begging bowl culture”. Go deeper with our long read on the centralisation of power in the UK and the “dead hand of Whitehall”.
The North receives one of the lowest levels of investment among advanced economies, according to a new report from the think tank IPPR North report, which once again highlights the massive regional disparities in the UK compared to other developed nations. The report also criticises the government’s approach to closing these gaps, saying: “The ongoing cost-of-living crisis combined with public spending levels in the coming years mean that levelling up is now on life support.” What should we do? Look to countries like Germany for inspiration, the authors say.
Also at that convention, Michael Gove announced £15m to improve social housing conditions in Greater Manchester, in the wake of the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died of a respiratory condition after exposure to mould in a flat in Rochdale. Gove said making sure all homes are warm and safe is a government priority, “as we know poor housing kills”. How far will £15 million go among 10 councils in GM? A council leader we spoke to yesterday said they welcomed the money, but admitted it would probably help to fix up a few buildings at the most.
“A van abandoned on a back street in Salford, an unfavourable story in The Times newspaper, and a damning judges report,” — the business journalist Michael Taylor certainly knows how to draw us in. His latest story for The Business Desk is about a firm that operates in the murky world of distressed companies and insolvency. Dive in.
And finally, we are deeply saddened to learn of the death of longtime Miller Diane Cooke, a former features journalist who worked for papers like The Bolton News, The Lancashire Telegraph and the Manchester Evening News. Diane was one of our first readers and offered Joshi a lot of encouragement when he founded The Mill in 2020. After we launched, she was among the first people to post about us on social media and become a member. One tribute describes Diane as a “loving mother, a writer of wit, intelligence, integrity and honesty, and a brilliant friend.”
Hundreds of Manchester students are refusing to pay their rent this month. We met them
By Mollie Simpson
“They don’t care about students’ wellbeing, right?” Maya says, sipping the peach iced tea I just bought her in Starbucks in Fallowfield. “They don’t care about our safety or our happiness, they care about the money we give.”
Maya is 18 and grew up in east London. She was part of the feminist society at her school and helped organise Antifa protests in London. Now, she studies philosophy and politics at the University of Manchester and considers herself a Marxist. She posts videos of her media appearances on TikTok with the hashtag #eattherich and is among the most vocal and prominent organisers in a movement called the “UoM rent strike”. In her favourite pub, The Garratt on Princess Street, the bartender asked her recently “aren’t you that rent strike girl?”
On TikTok, some less supportive commenters have called her an example of “rich Russell Group students kicking off again” or told her that she should wait until she graduates and has to pay council tax. “Welcome to adult life,” one person wrote.
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