Sussex swipe £300k in library fines from students

We hit up the Office of Governance and Secretariat at Sussex Uni to find out exactly what’s going on with library fines. And fuck me sideways, they’re fucking us sideways.

Sussex have raked in £307,325.50 in library fines since the beginning of the academic year 2010/2011.

It breaks down like this.

In the 2011/2012 academic year they issued 98,908 individual fines alone.They have already given 31,070 fines this year.

We asked a second year English student what they thought about this, she said “shitballs”. Insightful stuff.

When we asked for the individual amount of each fine and if a student has been fined more than once, how much have they been fined and how many times have they been fined we were denied this data under section 21(1) of the FOI act.

Currently the uni has £91,595 of unpaid fines.

We questioned a few students what they thought of the uni milking us this way, one Drama student said “Crikey”.

One Brighton Uni student went on to say “That’s not fine”. Good pun there Brighton student.

Students are often held to ransom in final year and aren’t allowed to graduate if they have unpaid library fines. However the Office for Fair Trading (OFT for the acronym fans amongst us) slapped unis with a warning about this earlier in the year.

In case you were wondering, here are some things the uni could have spent the £307,325.50 on:

1,235,479 bottles of Aldi lager

115,671 Boots pharmaceuticals toe nail clippers

This yacht

271,969 Egg & Cress sandwiches from Tesco’s