Universities in Leeds must be held responsible for their students' behaviour - YEP letters

This is an open letter to Leeds universities’ on their responsibility for their students’s behaviour in our area.

As one vice-chancellor wrote, indeed your students are not solely responsible for the situation in the local area.

In many ways the students are just victims, collateral damage in an infrastructure which has evolved consisting of entitled students and their entitled parents, some lazy and unscrupulous landlords and ladies, and the drug pushers who work for themselves at the expense of us all.

Let us also add in a council and a police force who either genuinely don’t realise just how bad the situation has become, or don’t have the will or the capacity to change it.

However, as far as the students are concerned, they may not be solely your students, and it is not all students, but the party-goers are all students.

And the students are only here because the universities are here. And this gives the unis both the responsibility and ability to do something about the situation.

Presently there are two distinct types of party-type anti-social behaviour.

The raves such as the one that happened on Woodhouse Moor were not organised by students and were mostly locals and nearly all from other areas of Leeds.

But this letter is not just about noise, parties drugs and alcohol abuse.

Anti-social behaviour also includes incompetent waste management.

Also, on leaving day, they just wheel mattresses and sofas out onto the street for someone else to deal with.

This is the disgusting depth of anti-social behaviour.

And then there are few things more insensitive than parking in front of a neighbour’s drive.

Obviously the council hasn’t helped by painting white parking lines down some streets (eg Moorland Avenue), but you would think that the presence of a parking area, especially if there is a vehicle in it, would be a giveaway.

In general the graffiti and the flytipping (apart from the aforementioned mattresses) aren’t directly the students’ fault, but by treating the neighbourhood badly you invite others to regard it as a dumping ground.

Local residents who live here all year round keep the area afloat - just.

We keep the shops, the takeaways and the pubs (what’s left of them) ticking over.

Without us the area would die altogether.

So when two entitled parents told one particular resident on two separate occasions within one week in July that she was living in the wrong area, those parents should realise that without us, their children would not last the distance.