SCORES of teenagers are being put up in hotels due to a housing crisis at a Hampshire university.

Students are facing round trips of up to 40 miles to get to lectures, adding more than £1,000 in travel costs to their fees.

They have accused university bosses of being “greedy” and taking on more students than they can cope with.

More than 100 students at the University of Winchester are being forced to travel in from digs as far away as Southampton and Basingstoke.

Fifty freshers have been given rooms at the Liberty Point student housing complex in Southampton with 73 others placed in stop-gap hotels in Eastleigh, Basingstoke and Winchester while the university scrambles to find enough beds to house its record intake of students.

Daily Echo:

Liberty Point student housing complex in Southampton

Thirty-six are staying at a Premier Inn in Basingstoke, 18 at a Premier Inn in Eastleigh and 19 at the Holiday Inn in Morn Hill, Winchester.

It is the second accommodation crisis in five years that university bosses have faced.

In 2009 they were forced to put 50 students up in a hotel near Southampton Airport.

Some students were moved to a former homeless hostel and an old people’s home – in which at least one elderly resident still lived – before being housed permanently.

University bosses had hoped that a 500-bed complex in Burma Road, opened last year, would meet demand and ease the “studentification” of Winchester estates like Stanmore.

But fewer than 400 of these rooms are available to Winchester students, with 54 allocated to sixth-formers at Sparsholt College and 50 let to nearby Royal Hampshire County Hospital.

The 50 freshers allocated this year to private halls at Liberty Point, Southampton, will be forced to pay £1,092 for an annual rail ticket to attend lectures on top of their £127-a-week rent.

Sarah Newstead, 19, was due to start a law degree in Winchester next week but is reconsidering after being placed in Southampton.

She said: “We just don’t seem to be treated the way we should be. How can you play with people’s lives? You’re just a name on a piece of paper rather than a person.”

Sarah Hughes, who was also given a bed in Liberty Point, said: “I think they’re just being greedy, taking on too many people. They know they don’t have enough housing.

“I would rather have been turned down on results day and told they don’t have enough.”

The University of Winchester has accepted record numbers of students this year, believed to be more than 2,000.

Deputy vice-chancellor Professor Neil Marriott said there was “unprecedented” demand for housing this year as more students than expected had retained their place.

“This year the Government has provided additional university places,” he said. “We have experienced high demand from applicants who have applied late. Although the university does not normally guarantee accommodation to students who accept an insurance offer of a place or apply late, the university made a decision to support those students who need accommodation.”

A university spokesman added that only students who applied through clearing have been placed outside of Winchester, adding that the university met its guarantee to provide centrally managed housing to first-year students who applied before June.