The need increases to c. 27,700 beds per annum if also replacing poor-quality university stock by 2029/30 In Section 2 we estimated a total of c. 36,200 poor- quality university beds that also need to be replaced, bringing the total required to 106,800 . There will also be some in the private sector that have reached the end of their economic lives, though probably not as many. Assuming a third of these are replaced every year from 2027 to 2029, there would need to be c. 27,700 beds delivered per year (which supersedes the 15,600 modelled on the previous page). We show this in Chart 3.2b. This would suggest that the rate of delivery needs to ramp up from c. 23,750 beds per annum up to c. 27,700 to address the very worst of the university stock. This is a conservative figure and would be higher if you account for additional university beds in Quality C for which replacement is more appropriate than refurbishment, and also for poor-quality beds in the private sector. In practice, the prospect of these poor-quality beds being replaced in the next three years is remote, as universities will need to progress through governance, planning and construction. It is more likely that some private PBSA will be built to fill this gap. What is surprising about this analysis is that the scale of current delivery is actually not lagging that far behind the need for it. If the UK had not been hit by increased interest rates and construction inflation, the scale of delivery might actually be on track with this particular analysis (acknowledging that it is only one way of measuring UK demand). Of course, another constraining factor is availability of land. Also, this analysis is aggregating supply and demand at a UK level, and that some of the beds under construction are being delivered in markets that we would already consider reasonably well-served. On the whole, though, it is interesting to observe that our present estimates of the demand for additional and replacement PBSA beds in the UK – which are more cautious than many previous estimates – are much closer to the actual rate of delivery. However, this analysis is simply comparing the total UK demand with the total UK pipeline, and is ignoring the fact that many of the markets in which these additional or replacement beds are needed do not have rents that are strong enough to support new development. On the next page we attempt to quantify this issue. Page 28 | SFG | Meeting demand for modernised university-owned accommodation