Lecturer, poor, 30, seeks affordable home in the city

How's this for an American eye-popper? When MPs on the education select committee visited the USA last year they were amazed to discover that New York University was engaged in an ambitious building plan to house its academics. And the NYU professors weren't being accommodated just anywhere; they were being put in apartments in Manhattan, in the sumptuous centre of the richest country on earth.

New York University told the British visitors that it had built 10,000 residential units for staff and students in the past 10 years, a staggering number by any standard. What is stopping British universities doing the same thing?

The question arises because London is in the grip of a growing crisis, as highlighted in a report published last week by the Greater London Assembly. It is becoming increasingly difficult to hire - and to keep - policemen, nurses, teachers and bus drivers in the capital. The report didn't mention academics - but it should have done, because there is growing anecdotal evidence that London's sky-high property prices are making it difficult for universities to recruit and almost certainly to retain staff. That is an issue that the Commons select committee is expected to touch on in a report on the quality of teaching, due next week (8 March).

"It is a problem trying to recruit staff from outside London," says Professor Geoffrey Copland, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Westminster. "The reason is the difference in the cost of housing. These people are not on the London property ladder and it is virtually impossible for them to jump on to it."

At the root of the problem are the pitiful salaries paid to academics. School teachers and policemen are better off than university staff. A lecturer starting out in London at the bottom of the salary scale is paid just under pounds 21,000 a year, including London weighting. And remember, he or she will have spent years studying to acquire extra degrees. Even people working on the lifts and escalators in London Underground receive more money. In 1999 they were earning pounds 22,247 for a job which requires few academic qualifications, although it requires them to work nights.

"How long can you go on with very low pay for academics and not think that the quality of teaching won't suffer?" asks Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the education select committee. "We visited the University of Kingston. Staff can't afford to live there." Lecturers have fallen behind in the pay stakes at a time when property prices in London have soared. Academics may be able to find somewhere to rent - probably at an exorbitant sum and sharing with another - but they find it virtually impossible to buy. Twenty to 30 years ago, academics were able to afford mortgages in the inner suburbs of Islington, Kennington or Stockwell. Now they can't. A small one-bedroom flat in a good part of Islington was on the market last week for pounds 165,000; a three- bedroom Victorian house in Wandsworth was for sale at pounds 317,500. When you consider that building societies will lend you three or four times your income, you can see that pounds 21,000 does not take you very far. Academics find themselves pushed out to Stratford in east London or Enfield in north London, or much further afield to Oxford, Cambridge, Brighton, St Albans and Southampton.

Last week I spoke to a lecturer aged 30, who was teaching at one of the best London colleges. With a first degree from Oxford and a DPhil, also from Oxford, he was on a salary of pounds 24,400. He has a wife and child, with another on the way, but he can't afford to buy a family home. So, he is making do by renting in Oxford in a part of the city with good schools, and undergoing an arduous commute four days a week. "Really, I should not have got married or had children," he says.

The key issue is retaining these staff, says the Greater London Assembly report. Meg Hillier, chair of the Affordable Housing Scrutiny Committee which produced the report, says: "We think retention is the next looming crisis."

The capital's universities have no problem recruiting graduates to work as teaching assistants. Graduate students are prepared to share accommodation and to rent in grotty areas. Universities also seem to have no problem filling posts with foreign academics. A report from the Home Office last month showed more than half the faculty of the London School of Economics is made up of non-British nationals.

"What most of us are observing is that you can get people to come to London and you can make a recruitment package quite desirable," says Professor Christine Whitehead, a housing economist at the London School of Economics who advised the Greater London Assembly on its report. "The question arises two or three years on when those people have a child and want to buy. How will we keep them?"

London colleges have what is called "a hollowing-out" problem, according to Professor Whitehead. They can attract academic staff at the bottom and top ends of the age range, but they can't retain those with three or four years' experience as a tutor.