Why are pensioners exempt from this policy while disabled people are not?
The misery and injustice of the bedroom tax has been well documented, as has the fact that there simply aren’t enough smaller properties to accommodate those deemed to have a ‘spare bedroom’.
But what hasn’t received adequate coverage so far is that pensioners are exempt from this policy while disabled people – who make up two thirds of those affected by the bedroom tax – are not.
This is a strange exemption given that one of the stated aims of the bedroom tax is to free up larger ‘under-occupied’ properties in order to reduce overcrowding. As Labour MP Emily Thornberry pointed out in today’s Opposition Day Debate, older people often inhabit houses with unoccupied bedrooms.
She put the following question to the pensions minister Steve Webb, who is filling in for Iain Duncan Smith:
‘The honourable gentleman began his contribution this afternoon by talking about overcrowding…part of the problem is ‘empty nesters’, elderly people whose families have grown up. If the principle behind this bedroom tax is…to move people on to smaller units, why does it not apply to pensioners?’
Far from saying that the bedroom tax should be extended to pensioners, Thornberry was exposing a further injustice in this wretched policy.
What reason can the government possibly give for excluding older people which does not also apply to disabled people? That older people are more likely to vote Conservative, perhaps?
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14 Responses to “Bedroom Tax Debate: Emily Thornberry MP highlights a glaring inconsistency”
Sparky
Fred has lived for decades in state housing, paying a much lower rent than poor Jack across the street who couldn’t get a council house. Then one day Fred is made redundant, and has to claim housing benefit. So now Fred is asking the state to pay his rent. But the state doesn’t want to pay all Fred’s rent because Fred is living in a big house and the state desperately wants that big house to house families. It didn’t mind so much when Fred was paying the rent because the state was receiving money from Fred. Now the state is paying the state. Oh dear, something is going to change.
So the state asks Fred to make a contribution if he wants to stay in his big house. Not a huge contribution, just 14% of the rent for one spare room, 25% for two spare rooms. Yes, the state will stay pay 86% of Fred’s rent if he has one spare room and 75% of his rent if he has two two rooms. Still pretty generous of the nice state (that’s other people’s tax money, in case you’d forgotten).
But Fred, poor chap, despite years of very cheap accommodation compared to old Jack across the street has saved nothing for a rainy day, hasn’t a bean in the world. So he can’t make any contribution. Oh dear, Fred is in a pickle.
But Fred has learned a valuable lesson about personal responsibility, accountability and the how socialism makes people complacent and dependent.
Mason Dixon, Autistic
Except that if Jack has been staying in his private accommodation for the same amount of time Fred had stayed in his- there is no additional charge for the extra rooms at all. This is because the legislation that made it so private renters would have reduced Housing Benefit was not retroactive for obvious reasons that went straight over the heads of our current government. They did make their under-occupancy charge retroactive and ignored all the experts pointing out the problems way in advance.
They must be socialists to be so complacent and certainly they depend much on their wilful ignorance.
Bill Kruse
The bedroom tax does affect pensioners http://speye.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/bedroom-tax-does-affect-pensioners-from-april-2013-oh-what-a-tangled-webb-we-weave-minister/ I suspect very few people taking part in that debate knew what they were talking about.
Bill Kruse
But if a family moves in they do so in the knowedge that when the kids leave home they’ll no longer be able to afford to live there as they’ll fall foul of the bedroom tax and they won’t be able to move somewhere smaller as those properties don’t exist. So they can’t move there in the first place. What’s really happening, as we’re seeing, is that properties of that type are being demolished and the land sold off for building luxury flats to be sold as asset classes to the very wealthy. That’s the real point of the OBC and the BT. It’s clearing the poor off the land to create enclaves of the wealthy like they have in South Africa. Enclaves can be defended and they’ll need to be too. The war we’re in, the rich against the poor, is becoming overt.
SgtVimes
You are quite right that the elderly should not be intimidated or bullied out of their homes. Neither should the disabled.
Is there a connection here between the age demographic of the traditional conservative voter and the exemptions for pensioners from many of the worst cuts to the benefit system?