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.
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123 Responses to “Five things David Cameron doesn’t want you to know about the Bedroom Tax”
Newsbot9
1. No pay rises for the poor, or you’re evicted and lose far more in rent.
2. Isolate the country, losing tens of billion in trade. Millions killed, in most likely scenarios.
3. Massive tax break for the rich, enhancing the power of the 1%
4. Massive tax break for the rich, enhancing the power of the 1%
5. End the NHS and schools, sending the poverty premium soaring.
[Ban the only sources of funding for small business]
6. Force the sale of what remains to ensure that it becomes more expensive
7. Raise the poverty premium again, giving them perhaps 10% of the raised poverty premium back, woo!
20+ million dead, conservative estimate. Housing becomes more expensive and scarcer, healthcare and schooling is too expensive for most….
Newsbot9
It’s yet another Tory attack against communities and families, of course.
Mr Reasonable
No, it’s not about immigrants!! It’s about finding ways of squeezing money from those at the ‘bottom of the pile’ ( who have no ‘clout’ in this country, so government can do what it wants to them) to placate the bond markets and the World Bank who keep telling them to cut public spending and borrowing. Talk about immigrants or social security ‘scroungers’ always misses the point about any government’s real priority, which is to keep the bond markets (and this government’s real domestic constituency, the rich) happy. Indeed, the bond markets are the answer to the question, ‘why do we have a coalition government?’ And no, it’s not because of the ‘hung parliament’. The coalition agreement came about because the bond markets insisted on a ‘stable government’. Hence, coalition and not a re-run of the election, which would have been a nod towards democracy, or whatever passes for it in this semi-feudal country.
Anyway, I expect that the bedroom tax will be the first of a number of increasingly cruel and mad policies to nab smaller and smaller amounts of money from the poorest in Britain. Why? ‘Cos the poor have no allies and no-one to speak up for them.
(And yes, the government are mad! The fire service is about to be privatised. True!)
NuLabour Nemesis
Those who work (the 1% as some contributors would have it) should slave to subsidise guest-rooms and facilitate sub-letting for those who don’t (the 99%). Obviously.
dj
Let’s not forget the people who’ve been lucky enough to find an altenative housing with the ‘correct’ amount of rooms only to find that their rent costs have increased (these people will then get more housing benefits – costing us more in the end). I know of one case where a person has had an increase of housing benefit of £15 a week after downsizing to a one bedroom apartment.