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”
Mr Reasonable
Of course if (heaven forbid) you lose your job, then I’m sure that you will deserve your ‘subsidy’. Or maybe you will forego it, sleep in a tent and live off berries and rainwater?
LB
No. 5,300 bn is the state pensions liabilities, off the books.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_263808.pdf bottom of page 4. Check for yourself. The ONS figures are two years out of date.
For the banks. Lets see.
30 bn loss on share trading by Gordon.
35 bn profit on penal rates of interest
220 bn profit on taxes.
What losses?
Will this change solve anything? Nope. I agree with you. Not one iota of a difference to what’s going to happen.
The reason is that the state is bankrupt. Not a little bankrupt, but completely bankrupt. It’s the pensions. It’s all off the books and there are no assets to pay for it. So they can’t pay for it. It’s too large to be paid out of taxes. Given that each taxpayer gets more government spending that they pay in tax, its only going to go one way.
It’s all made up of lots of little things like Bob Crow in subsidised housing. All of them add up. They have all been paid for out of people’s pension contributions. A spend now pay later approach, aided by hdiing teh debts off the books.
So if you think its bad now, its going to be absolutely dire. Don’t think either that because I’m pointing that out, that I think this is a good think. I think its a disaster.
What I do think is that its people like you who haven’t a clue about who is paying the price, to demand that people have spare bedrooms, that are responsible.
Mr Reasonable
As opposed to a state that stifles the aspirations of those who are made poorer by those who get richer at their expense, perhaps?
Mr Reasonable
Then I wouldn’t read the comments from some of the other contributors to this ‘debate’!
Mr Reasonable
Who are the “underbelly”? Is that today’s new euphemism for the poor? What other euphemisms do you employ and for which other groups in society?
I have lived in council houses and am educated enough to know that you should have finished your first sentence after the word “tax”. A question mark was required after the word “all”, because the word “why” indicates that a question is to be asked. You also forgot to use a full stop after the word “down”. It is, after all, the end of a sentence!
Just helping out.