Below is the speech I made at the Campaigns Launch of Christ Church Student's Union, Canterbury. Wes Streeting, VP Education did the speech launching the Education Campaign and I (in Veronica's place) did the Welfare one. A bi well done needs to go out to Rob Thorburn, President and Becci Heard, VP Education and Welfare for all their hard works and for having good, change making campaigns to launch - I am sure they will keep them busy.

If you have views on my speech and the work I am doing please continue to get in touch on richard.angell@nus.org.uk and/or 07966 161 444. Enjoy...

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Welfare to work, the NUS way!

The NUS welfare campaign is not the campaign where we go and hug and kiss people, not just giving out flyers and the occasional condom. Welfare is about your well-being, your standards, it is about your rights!

The traditional welfare campaign has been seen as about giving people the information they need about to live a healthy, active student experience. But the innate problem with awareness raising is that we all know plenty of things that we care little about or have little impact on how we act.

The campaigns we run must either truly change the way we behave or prevent some of the social situations that ruin your student experience in the first place rather that running round fire-fighting weeks later. All more than leaflets, they should be strategic attempts to transform the lives of our members because for too many being a student is not all it is cracked up to be and not like jumping into the pages of your prospectus!

Whether it be the fact that:

• 23% of student live with rats and vermin;
• 75% of student live with damp; and
• 1 in 5 lose the deposits!

Or that:

• 1 in 4 people under 25 have Chlamydia;
• That access to a GUM clinic can be a minimum wait of a month; and
• That doctors and dentists have closed their list to too many students.

This experience is alien from what we have previously being used to in the family home and nothing like the communities in which we were brought up. Because students are seen as sub-human, quasi residents and council tax dodgers! None of these are true but this is what a welfare campaign has to fight.

When lobbying last year for a change to the bin day and wheelie bins for the student community, we took picture of the rats, the mess and the grime to a local Tory Council who dismissed our campaign and said, "Thankfully no local residents have to live in this area." For a start this was simply not true but these are the attitudes that leave students in such appalling conditions. By the way, in the end we got the bin-day changed and we are now waiting on the wheelie bins!

NUS will be meeting this fight over the coming months, being your voice and collective to stand up to defend and extent your rights in the classroom, on campus and in the community.

This year NUS will be taking on the government to win free prescriptions because we do not believe that students should have to choose between books, food and medicine! It is wrong; the government currently spends copious amounts of form filling for the HC1 NHS papers that ends up giving most students the support they need. But it puts time, money and bureaucracy in the way of the health mind and health body we all need to be successful on our course. The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly has listened and made it right for students - this year will be the start of opening this government's ears!

We will be helping you win the arguments locally too, NUS won major changes in the Housing Act that brought standards, licences and power for local authorities to drag up the standard of local housing. The implementation of this Act is not to be delivered by one government department but 150 different local authorities. So NUS should not be content to have the rights on paper, we will not rest until every local authority in the country has given these rights and used their powers and then we will be coming back asking the government for more! This means giving you the arguments and preparing you for the fights ahead.

There are two million Higher Education students in the UK, about half of these live in the private rented sector. We know a fifth of them lose their deposits of at least £200 a time. That makes £40million of non return deposits every years so this year NUS is working with the Department for Communities and Local Government to role out Tenancy Deposit Schemes making sure student money is out of landlord hands and returned where it should be - to you!

But NUS does not just work on the generic, not just in the millions or for everyone all at once, we are an organisation ready to stand on the side of the vulnerable. And in HE that is too often not the young, but the maturer of our colleagues. Second chance learners, and often the very people the government talks of getting into university through widening participation. Theses students, many here at Canterbury, are often flip flopped between support services, left confused about ages rates and what they can apply for and can't be on campus waiting for a particular book to be returned at 4pm because they have a family or life to be getting on with. This year NUS, led by Veronica King, and your former President, Richard Budden - our marvellous Bubble - will be round the UK working to get every institution signed up to the Mature Students Charter getting a serious refocus on students who are too often forgotten.

Finally, we all feel the pressure of top-up fees as they mount, how the fees and debt are driving students from their societies into work places on a greater scale that ever before. 1 in 5 working students do the hours of a full timer, the poorest students work for hourly rates a fraction of middle class colleagues and gender pay gap is more stark than anywhere else in society because students are in low paid, part time, service, hospitality and retail sectors. Students' union and NUS can no longer ignore this fact and watch our students left with second class terms and conditions, no knowledge of their rights and pressured to work longer hours to miss their studies. This year NUS has made historic links with the trade union movement so that we can transform this experience.

You should all leave here today and join a trade union, they stand up for their members every day, much like students' unions, they will advocate on your behalf and are behind every progressive campaign for equality and opportunity in the UK. They need new members and leaders but we all need their protection, solidarity and support - not just when we need them to fund our demo. So go join up now.

Thanks you for listening, get active and stand up and be counted. This welfare campaign is the chance for you to be the change you want to see in society!

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