The student Christmas travel plan is another half-baked idea – I’m sick of being let down by this government

I woke up to the news that unless I travel home between 3 and 9 December, I could face Christmas in a student flat away from my family.  

As a final year student at Manchester University, stress has been building over the past few weeks. Students who live on campus have been fenced into accommodation and denied adequate access to university resources, including on campus study space and subject specific libraries. This latest government announcement is another example of the mismanagement of students.

Like many students at my university, I first found out through frantic WhatsApps and tweets this morning. My immediate reaction was panic – how are the 100,000 students in Manchester supposed to leave the city in a six-day window? Most students rely on public transport to travel home. At the best of times, such a mass exodus would put a strain on public transport, let alone now with the reduction of many services and social distancing.  

My first response was to check train prices. I was shocked by what I found: journey after journey sold out. In pre-Covid times, the price of a return ticket from Manchester to my home near Oxford would cost £52 with a railcard, now the only tickets available cost triple that.

Many first year students are living away from their families for the first time, with Christmas being their first opportunity to head home. Now it seems students will be priced out of train and bus journeys, and unable to travel unless a family member can drive them. This simply isn’t possible for many students.  

This plan could work if the government invested in arranging extra services to cope with student demand that week, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to head home and that prices don't spike, or helped students with transport costs. But currently this doesn’t seem to be on the table.  

Reports suggest that students will be given a specific date on which to travel, but when exactly will this happen? By early this morning, train and bus tickets to my hometown were already exhausted for the whole of December. Waiting for an allocated date is a gamble, and the prize at stake is a family Christmas.

Travel difficulties aside, this decision will also impact on our studies. The University of Manchester breaks up on 21 December, meaning that we will be denied two weeks’ worth of library access, right before January exams and essay deadlines.  

The prospect of online lessons at home will also pose great difficulty for many students. Two million UK households don’t have access to the internet, and the connection at university is often far better than at home.  

As graduation looms, the thought of my ever-increasing student debt frequently taunts me, especially given the dire job market at the moment. I am angry that we were told to move back to university for blended learning and then left abandoned with 100 per cent online lectures, paying rent on unnecessary accommodation. Now we are expected to pay rent on a property we have to vacate for a minimum of a month, or face Christmas alone in a student flat.  

Whilst I am incredibly frustrated, I am not surprised to see another train wreck of a government decision and am no longer shocked by its inability to plan ahead.  

The strategy for the return of students seems to be no more than an empty gesture, an ill-conceived plan written out on the back of a napkin in Westminster. Student wellbeing is clearly not a priority for this government – they have let us down again.

Isabella Jewel is a final year French and Italian student at the University of Manchester and a freelance journalist