SWANSEA: The £45m student tower by High Street station wants to let 28 rooms to workers instead

Twenty-eight rooms in the student tower at the top of High Street could be let to people who are not students.

They sit in five shared flats on the first floor, each with five or six bedrooms around a shared kitchen and living room, which is how student blocks are laid out. Twenty-eight bedrooms between them.

The owners of the Oldway Centre have asked Swansea Council for permission to let all 28 to non-students for five years, after which they would go back to students.

The reason given is that the building is not full. The planning statement says occupancy has fallen materially over recent academic years and the block is running significantly below the capacity it was built for.

The Oldway Centre is a 13-storey former office block. It was bought in 2015, rebuilt at a cost of £45m and opened to students in September 2019 with 556 bedspaces. The 28 rooms are about one in twenty of them.

Nothing would be built, altered or knocked through.

The statement says the rooms would be aimed mainly at young professionals and working people wanting to live in the city centre.

Why letting a room to a worker needs planning permission

When the offices became student flats, the council tied the permission to a legal agreement requiring the rooms to go to registered students. That agreement is still running.

So the owners have put in two applications at once. One changes the wording of the planning permission itself. The other lifts the students-only rule for those 28 rooms, and only for five years.

The first has gone in as a non-material amendment, the route used for changes considered small enough not to need a fresh application. The three previous ones on this building were about window positions, cladding panels and louvres.

The applicant’s case is that 28 rooms out of 556, for five years, with no building work, does not materially change anything. Whether the council agrees is what it now has to decide. It has not said when.

The part of the case the public cannot read

The section of the statement setting out the operational and financial position, paragraphs 5.18 to 5.24, has been blacked out in the public copy.

So have both appendices: a letter from the site operator, Fresh, dated 13 April, and one from the applicant’s accountants, Venitt and Greaves, dated 31 March.

The council will see the unredacted figures. Anyone else reading the application gets the conclusion without the numbers underneath it.

How many student rooms Swansea has

The applicant’s agents set out their own count of what is available. Using the council’s own 2023 review, they list Coppergate at 307 rooms, the Oldway Centre at 556 and Mariner Street at 780, making 1,643 in the city centre.

Adding 1,175 rooms at the Singleton Park campus and 550 at True Student takes the figure to at least 3,368, which they describe as conservative and which leaves out the 2,440 rooms at Bay Campus.

Against that, they argue, taking 28 rooms out for five years is less than one per cent and would make no difference to students looking for somewhere to live.

The second time this building has changed what it is for

The site sits outside the part of Swansea where the council caps the number of shared houses. The agents argue no family home would be lost and the building is professionally managed throughout.

When permission was granted in 2017, officers accepted the loss of the offices because the block had had very few tenants for years, and the applicant said a fifth of Swansea’s office space was empty.

It is not the only student block in the city whose owners have looked elsewhere for occupants. In January, plans went in to turn the former Boutique Student Living block on St Helen’s Road into 76 studios for people moving on from homelessness.

Council leader Rob Stewart was shown round the Oldway Centre weeks before it opened. Purpose-built blocks like it, he said then, would help “reduce the demand for HMO conversions in neighbouring local communities”.

Seven years on, its owners want to turn part of it into HMOs.