Roar can exclusively reveal that Vice-Chancellor Shitij Kapur’s flat within the Maughan Library is 1,800 square feet (167 square meters) and that the university has invested tens of thousands of pounds in renovations in recent years. His total cost to the university is estimated at over £440,000 per year.
This means that the Vice-Chancellor’s apartment is almost 20 times larger than most of the Stamford Street Apartment (SSA) residences offered to King’s College London (KCL) students. These are 10 square meters or less, with the exception of studio apartments which are 14 square metres.
The complementary private space available to Vice-Chancellor (VC) Kapur in the Grade II listed building is therefore 18.5 times larger than that available to students on King’s Affordable Accommodation Scheme (KAAS) in SSA.
The Maughan Library lies in the borough of the City of London, one of the wealthiest areas of the country. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that the average apartment size in this borough is 44 square meters, four times smaller than the Maughan flat.
Furthermore, Roar can reveal that over £60,000 has been spent on renovations to the apartment since the announcement of Kapur’s appointment as VC in October 2020.
Last year, King’s estimated that the Vice-Chancellor’s accommodation grant was worth £56,000 for the financial year. The largest individual room offered by KCL is the 28 square metre large studio at the Atlas accommodation in Vauxhall. Yet despite having only 17% of the floor space of the VC’s apartment, this costs students £23,817/year, a full 43% of the estimated rental value of the newly renovated Maughan flat.
The Vice-Chancellor’s accommodation has the two added benefits of being centrally located and housed within a building that has passed for both the Tower of London and Houses of Parliament in high-profile films.
During 2022-23, Vice-Chancellor Kapur received a base salary of £295,000. In April 2023, the ONS reported that the median gross annual earnings for full-time employees in the UK was £34,963. Including the estimated £56,000 rental value of his apartment as a set annual grant, this would put Vice-Chancellor Kapur’s baseline compensation at over ten times the national average.
On top of this, the university paid a further £63,000 into his pension in the 2022-23 financial year. This brought his total annual declared renumeration to £414,000. Between 1 August 2022 and 31 July 2023, VC Kapur also claimed a further £28,399.70 in expenses incurred in the course of his role. This includes three travel bills (to Phoenix, Singapore and Lagos) exceeding £5,000 each. This makes the Vice-Chancellor’s total cost to the university in one year £442,399.70.
KCL declined to comment.
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