The University of Sussex is this week appealing the recent council planning decision to reject their masterplan that would see thousands of additional student homes built on campus.

The university needs to expand to keep up with other leading universities.

The masterplan would bring state of the art facilities as well as more student housing on campus.

The university could take on around six thousand extra students without the masterplan going ahead.

However, this would mean thousands of additional students in Brighton and Hove in unmanaged accommodation rather than in new housing on campus.

This increase in the number of students without additional housing on campus would see the number of family homes in the city being turned into HMOs for students greatly increase.

Many residents are already concerned by student housing in the city, which was shown in an article on this subject in The Argus on June 10.

Students and our universities bring many benefits to our city, including culturally and economically.

Sussex students and their visitors spend £106 million per year in the local area. The university supports 3,700 local jobs and the masterplan would add an additional 2,400 new jobs.

The masterplan would deliver a roadmap for the university to provide even more managed accommodation for its students, helping to ensure that only 5,800 of the potential 18,000 students will not live in halls or at home.

I favour the planned modernisation that the masterplan would provide and am hopeful for a positive outcome to their appeal.