Five things David Cameron doesn’t want you to know about the Bedroom Tax

Good Society

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 who households 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”

  1. Angel Grace

    Private rented homes are effected to if claiming housing Benefit…….Also concerned about the council tax changes in october 2013 that the council tax Benefit will be gone and replaced to make Benefit claimers pay….would like more info on this..

  2. julie

    to each according to his need……, no one needs to be rich

  3. Alfie North

    Under the Housing Act immigrants do not have a right to social housing and therefore local authorities do not have a duty to house, but they are required to give advise to anyone who is threatened with,or actually homeless. The advice to immigrants usually consists of giving out a list of private sector landlords.

  4. Alfie North

    Migrant workers are only allowed access to any kind of support if they have paid national insurance and taxes in their home country. Reciprocally, all the ex-pat pensioners in Spain, Portugal, Greece etc receive the same rights as citizens of those countries.

    Asylum seekers receive some support and that is pitiful amounts, including food vouchers, with many living in poverty for long periods of time, with some are destitute, until they’re sent back to the man who wants to shoot and torture them.

    Student migrants get no support and pay through the nose for the privilege of studying here.

    Illegal immigrants get no support, they’re illegal afterall and are likely to be the most exploited by gang-masters and the like.

    It was only until very recently that migrant workers from the A8 countries could not claim out-of-work benefits unless they had completed 12 months of work in the UK.

    The UK was allowed to apply transition arrangements in the labour market for up to seven years – but those arrangements, which included the Worker Registration Scheme, were dropped at the end of April 2011.

    Migrants from the A8 countries will then be brought into line with migrants from all other EU countries.

    They will be able to apply for national government benefits, which in the UK includes jobseeker’s allowance, council tax benefit and housing benefit, but under what the Department for Work and Pensions describes as “strict rules”.

    A DWP spokesman said: “No-one can just come into the UK and start claiming our benefits.

    “We have strict rules in place to protect the system from any abuse. For instance, to claim an income-related benefit, a person from the EU will have to pass the Habitual Residence Test alongside all of our other eligibility criteria.

    “They will have to prove they have a right to reside here and will then be asked to prove their attachment to the UK; they will have to show an intention to settle here and their reasons for coming to the UK.

  5. Iamrich

    I agree with this tax, why should the underbelly of the Country get any housing benefit at all, the poor should work harder. Uneducated council housing scroungers on here need to pipe down

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