I can't remember when my last blog went up til, it's been v hectic here, but I'll just give you a run down on what I've been up to over the last couple of weeks. Like most of the NEC I've been poorly with Freshers Flu - many apologies to Hester from Hope for missing your Housing Week because of this!

Brighton to Lancaster to Manchester to London

On the week of the 27th I went down to Labour Party Conference for a couple of days, and went to lots of useful fringe meetings and met up with a couple of freindly MPs to talk about the Housing Bill. It was good to get a reasonable unbiases view of what is going on, as these MPs like the Bill but have reasonably similar views to NUS on how it could be made better for students. It sounds like we won't get everything we want in the Bill, but it's a lot better than it was at the beginning.

In the very early hours of Wednesday morning I went up to Lancaster to see what's going on with their Jarvis Halls that weren't ready for the start of term. 650 students are in contingency accommodation, which is rather unpleasant in places. Matt and Dan are doing a great job in keeping students informed what's going on, and hopefully they'll all be moved into their proper accommodation soon. This just goes to show what happens when private companies build halls and go bust in the middle of the process...

That night I went over to Manchester, as I was speaking at a students and crime seminar which was really interesting and gave me a chance to talk directly to local police officers responsible for crime reduction. That afternoon was the next co-op housing meeting with Amelia and Sarah from UMU and Man Met, where we taked about moving on to the next phase of the project.

Friday was going to be London Welfare network day, but unfortunately there weren't enough people registered, so I went to visit University of the Arts union instead and popped in to ULU freshers fayre in the afternoon.

Back in the Office

The week of the 4th October was a mostly-in-the-office week. Monday I caught up on emails and went to a meeting with Hannah and Kat to look in detail at NUS' policy on student funding, particularly in response to the changes that will come in in 2006.

Tuesday was an NEC meeting - these are on thw whole rather long affairs, and this was no exception! We talked about a number of issues, but didn't get through many motions as we had to spend a long time talking about the future of NUS.

Wednesday the 7th was partly spent in the office and partly meeting the No Smoking Day campaign to look at how NUS can support the campaign. It looks like they've got lots of good materials that'll work really well in unions for No Smoking Day (in March).

Thursday was spent mostly at the House of Lords, at the launch of the Uniaid project. This is a charity set up to fund students from disadvantaged backgrounds to get to University. It's aims are very good (and strangely it turns out that one of their staff members was in my class at uni), but at the moment it gets a lot of its accommodation bursaries from Unite, donated in the form of 'free rooms'. I'm not sure I think it's the job of business and charities to provide funding for poorer students - surely that should be the Government? I've done some press work on this issue too, in the Guardian and on BBC News 24, but I can't remeber what days they were!

Friday I was back in the office again. I had to look at the issue of Unite Halls and how they are dealing with the student loans problems - it seems they've been charging students £50 to go onto monthly direct debit payments instead of paying termly, which seems a little unfair. I emailed them to ask for this to be re-examined, and I've been informed that it costs them £50 in administrative costs to change to direct debits, which sounds like a lot of admin for a relatively small tasks. If you have Unite Halls locally it might be worth pressing this point with them.

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