Association President: What have you actually done?

Not everybody knows who Chloe Hill is.

The fifth female Students’ Association President in fifty years has spent a lot of time hiding in her office this year, and she is the first to admit she’s not been the most visible of APs.

“I’m a recluse now. I was a big partier when I was a student, but not any more.”

Last year, I met all of the 2013 nominees for Association President one Saturday afternoon for chats about their policies. I have to say that Chloe rated somewhere near the bottom of my ballot paper, seeming unforthcoming and with the least feasible policies of all candidates, including a letting agency run by the Union and a cap on international fees. Through a flawlessly executed campaign plan, she went on to beat even the popular joke Jamie Ross, who was tipped as a surefire win, and in June smoothly disappeared behind a door in the soon-to-be building site of the Union. Over the subsequent eight months, we heard little of what she was up to, most assuming she had simply faded into the background like so many APs before her, all talk and little action.

The lady that I met this week, ahead of the nominations for her successor, is an entirely different picture to the one seen almost exactly one year ago. Her demeanor is now friendly, chatty and generally upbeat, as she fills us in on what’s been going on with her. So how are those unfeasible policies going?

“The Union-run Letting Agency has been ticking over all year. I’ve had lots of conversations with the Principal and Residents Services, but it was always going to take more than one year as it’s setting up a whole business. But it’s going really well!”

But what about the legal ramifications, estate agencies who run their businesses, the huge scale of the operation…?

“There has been loads of University support. I told them I knew it was extreme but we need to compete, and they were like yeah we do need to! It’s still in the planning stages, but just give me two more months.”

Amazing. The thought of readily available housing lists with actual images is like heaven. What about giving 10% of the AP’s salary as an accommodation bursary?

“Instead I rewrote the whole accommodation subsidiaries system, and I think it’s my biggest success. By lifting the subsidiaries placed on Albany and Fife Park by ¼, it freed up £700, 000 worth of “mobile bursary”, so you can pick your choice of hall and still get it subsidised. That way it’s attached to the student instead of the hall, so options aren’t as limited.”

This does seem a little better than the £1800 that a salary cut would have provided, meager in comparison. International fee capping? Another success.

“I finally got them capped, as it was unacceptable and unfair to international students who had no way of budgeting for the whole four years.”

These fees had been rising 7 – 9% each year with mere months warning to the student. That is now capped at 5%, and will be clearly advertised from a student’s first day in a four-year plan, so no horrible surprises down the line.

It seems a lot of what Chloe has done is well hidden, taking a very different tactic to many of her predecessors and somehow making her achievements seem even greater in the process.

“I don’t write a blog about every single thing I achieve. Nobody knows who I am, but I guess I’ve got stuff done!”