Students are big business in city

In answer to Richard Norman and Robert Keen, let’s look at some facts (Make Room For More Families, Letters and Opinions, Kentish Gazette, August 29).

There are around 25,000 full-time students in the three universities in Canterbury.

Each student spends a minimum of £18,000 a year (£9k on fees, £4.5k on rent and £4.5k on food, leisure, shopping, books etc.).

This equates to a staggering £450 million a year spent in Canterbury making the student industry easily the biggest contributor to Canterbury’s economy.

The only other major industry is tourism.

Many of Canterbury’s tourists are day trippers and if each of them spends £45 a day, you would need 10 million tourists coming to Canterbury a year to match the size of the student industry.

Luckily both these industries complement each other perfectly as you have the tourists in the summer and the students for the rest of the year – in fact a perfect balance for the city.

What is important is that the student industry is solid whereas tourism can be fickle depending on the relative strength of sterling as a stronger pound could easily deter many overseas visitors from coming to the UK.

If anyone doesn’t think that many businesses depend on students for their survival in the non-summer months try speaking to the owners of pubs, shops, restaurants, taxis etc.

On the question of houses of multiple occupation (HMOs), the council has advised there are 3,200 student HMOs in Canterbury and a further 600 HMOs which are mainly occupied by professionals with perhaps one student in each house.

I hear the call that landlords of HMOs should pay council tax but in the UK it is usual for the people occupying a house to pay the council tax, not the owner of the house.

Regarding the proposed 4,000 new houses I have no idea who will occupy them as whenever a house comes up for sale in Canterbury they are often purchased by investors as no one else seems to be interested in buying.

This is not because the price has been pushed up by investors as the prices of three-bedroom houses in Canterbury has hardly moved in years and the determining factor seems to be the stamp duty threshold of £250,000.

The problem is that outside students and tourism there are no expanding industries to attract more workers to the city.

If you want diversity you have to attract the businesses, not just talk about it.