The London Plan and student accommodation: is it working?

Student First Group (SFG) and CBRE jointly ran a seminar in late 2022, bringing together developers, operators and universities to ask this question. London is still experiencing a bottleneck in Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA): supply is falling behind demand from students across the UK and across the world who are drawn to London as one of the top international destinations for Higher Education.

SFG has been building a profile of university requirements, actively matching supply with demand, and introducing universities to potential developments with a good fit. In this report we summarise the points that we made in the seminar and distil the ideas brought to the table by the attendees, all of whom had first-hand experience of grappling with the issues.