Left Foot Forward looks at five things David Cameron doesn't want you to know about the Bedroom Tax.
The Bedroom Tax, which will come in from 1 April 2013 as part of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, will charge people in social housing based on how many spare rooms they have, and will hit tenants aged 16 to 65.
Put simply, it means a cut to the amount of benefit a person will get if they have a spare bedroom in their housing association home.
Benefits will be reduced by 14% for one room and 25% for two or more bedrooms. On average, an individual affected by the Bedroom Tax will lose £14-£25 a week.
The bedroom tax is supposed to encourage those who live in social housing with spare rooms to downsize in order to make way for larger families.
That’s what it is supposed to do. But what impact will it really have?
Left Foot Forward has put together five things David Cameron doesn’t want you to know about the Bedroom Tax.
1. Two-thirds of
those whohouseholds that will be affected by the Bedroom Tax have disabled people in them. Down-sizing is often wildly unfeasible for wheelchair users due to the shortage of wheelchair accessible properties. In effect, the Bedroom Tax risks penalising disabled people for being disabled – those who cannot move to a smaller property will be forced to pay more for their housing needs.2. In many areas of the country there simply aren’t enough smaller houses for people to downsize to (which the Department of Work and Pensions accepts). A DWP assessment estimates that 31% (660,000) of social housing tenants will have their housing benefit cut as a result of the Bedroom Tax. What is likely to happen to those families who lose between £48 and £88 a month from their housing benefit because there aren’t smaller properties for them to move in to? Are they going to be evicted? Are they going to go hungry?
3. It will cause unnecessary misery and suffering. ITV has given real-life examples of how the Bedroom Tax could hit vulnerable people, such as the couple where the husband had a stroke and can no longer share a bedroom with his wife, or a tenant who uses her second bedroom as a sterile room to receive nutrition from a machine after she had surgery for bowel cancer. Both tenants will have £48 per month taken from their housing benefit from April.
4. The Bedroom Tax could cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds due to the likely increase in homelessness. A typical homelessness case costs £24,000, according to Govan Law Centre. It costs local authorities and housing providers £15,000. Evicting a tenant also costs a social landlord on average £6,000. The shortage of available smaller properties, combined with the inability of some tenants to pay the extra money, will see a spike in homelessness (bad enough in itself), and this will cost lots and lots and lots of money.
5. The new provisions could make overcrowding mandatory. There is no provision in the legislation for houses where the bedroom is only a single room. Children under 10 are expected to share a room as are under 16s if they are of the same sex. The rules do not refer to the size of bedrooms. A bedroom will always count as a bedroom for Housing Benefit no matter how small.
Use this benefits calculator to find out if you will be affected by the changes.
123 Responses to “Five things David Cameron doesn’t want you to know about the Bedroom Tax”
Denise L Mulligan
help iam being held to randsom in my own home. watching my loved one sick every day is hard enough without being taxed for being ill. we down sized two years ago and have just had our new place adapted to suit my husbands needs. moving is not an option for us.
Respect
Thanks for producing this blog 300 of our group members shared this within facebook & it has been amazing in generating debate !
Chairman ‘Respect For the Unemployed & Benefit Claimants’
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Respect-For-the-Unemployed-Benefit-Claimants/128136787240200
xxsue
A few bare facts about the ‘Bedroom Tax’
(Under-occupancy penalty) which affects Social Housing tenants only…1)
Subsidies-Social Housing (SH) properties receive £6.05 pw each as part
of a £1.2bn Capital subsidy; Private Rentals (PR) receive an £25.20 per
property as part of the £2.17bn extra Revenue subsidy in Housing
Benefit…2) Under-occupancy -SH has 390,000 ‘spare’ bedrooms; PR
624,000! 3) Environmental Health
regulations state that a bedroom must be more than 70sqft to be
considered a half bedroom (child under 10) and more than 90sqft for an
adult…most SH have a ‘spare’ room under these sizes and tenants should
not be charged for them. 4) There is not enough one bedroomed SH to
downsize to…my area has available to rent in PR an unsuitable 1st
floor flat at extra cost of £24 pw, a suitably sized but not adapted for my disability, two
bed bungalow at £76pw extra and please note that the same size of house
in PR is £145 MORE! Now my Friends this post is not about SH versus PR
,it is merely to point out to all of you tax payers that these measures
,far from saving millions of pounds, will actually cost millions in
extra Housing Benefits paid and the ensuing rent arrears with subsequent
eviction costs. I will not be affected by this travesty as a State
Pensioner…along with the 660,000 households paying this penalty…you,
the Tax payer will xx LB please note the very small amount in capital subsidy for Social Housing. All…please note that the government is not limiting the size of the bedrooms in accordance with EH regs yet they did insist on those guidelines being enforced by Councils housing Asylum Seekers. I have no problem with AS along with tenants in PR who are already receiving penalties by way of Housing Benefit caps on inflated private rents. What can ‘landlords’ do? Take up Knowsley HA’s example and consider EH regs and downgrade 3 bedroom properties to 2.9 where applicable (and usual in the social as well as private sector). What can the government do? Invest in growth and build more social housing…oh and consider their own guidelines! Won’t hold my breath…
Wendé Anne Maunder
Why can’t we somehow encourage landlords to take on the following action, since the Department for Work and Pensions has left it to social landlords to decide what counts as a bedroom.?
According to “Say No to the Bedroom Tax”, Knowsley Housing Trust is reclassifying 566 properties as smaller homes, in a move which will help tenants affected by the bedroom tax.
The 14,000-home association is re-designating some of its two and three-bedroom homes as one and two-bedrooms respectively, which will cost it £250,000 in rental income per year.
Bob Taylor, chief executive of KHT, said a stock review showed some homes are currently classified as having more bedrooms than they actually have, because tenants are not using the extra rooms as bedrooms. They are therefore paying too much rent.
Mr Reasonable
It’s a kind of perverse publicity stunt to keep their backbenchers and The Telegraph happy. Punishing the feckless poor keeps morale up, don’t you know…