There are reasons why the “bedroom tax” is so unpopular. It has all the right ingredients. It affects families that garner popular sympathy: foster parents, military families, and people caring for their disabled or terminally ill husbands and wives. This is not “un-deserving poor” material. Furthermore, losing a bedroom is a highly visible, concrete sacrifice with is relatively easy for the media to understand, compared to, for example, the NHS reforms; and certainly much easier than trying to illustrate the impact of benefits uprating. It even has a snappy name – the ‘bedroom tax’ – perfect for a twitter hashtag and one which resonates with connotations of the poll tax, granny tax and pasty tax.
Virtually every week, David Cameron makes fun of Ed Miliband and Labour for arguing that the “bedroom tax” is not in fact a tax. Yesterday’s pre-scripted jibe was typical of so many feeble attempts to discuss this important societal issue coherently, as follows:
“Let us be absolutely clear that this is not a tax. Let me explain to the Labour party that a tax is when someone earns some money and the Government take some of that money away from them—that is a tax. Only Labour could call a benefit reform a tax increase. Let me be clear to the hon. Gentleman: pensioners are exempt, people with severely disabled children are exempt and people who need round-the-clock care are exempt. Those categories of people are all exempt, but there is a basic issue of fairness. How can it be fair that people on housing benefit in private rented accommodation do not get a spare room subsidy, whereas people in social housing do? That is not fair and we are putting that right.”
Lord Richard Best was one of the first high profile figures to use the phrase when the Welfare Reform Bill was going through parliament towards the end of 2011. However, Lord Best, speaking yesterday at the Chartered Institute of Housing south east conference in Brighton, said: ‘I coined this phrase bedroom tax because this is a tax.
‘I have been much criticised for using this phrase, but if you have to pay a sum of money and you cant escape from doing so, and that sum of money goes to the government – it looks to me all very much like having a tax.’
Lord Best said housing associations need to make the point to government that the bedroom tax will reduce their income. He said:
‘The thing that will chime with government is that it will lessen your ability to build more homes and the government really does believe we need to do that.’
And here’s the rub. Lord Best is actually an expert in housing, and a Crossbench peer. His Wikipedia entry is as follows:
David Cameron made a couple of glaring errors about the tax yesterday, summarised in C4 FactCheck:
““People with severely disabled children are exempt.”
No. There’s no automatic exemption for disabled children. In fact, not only is the government not making this blanket exception, it is actually fighting a legal challenge on the point from 10 disabled children who argue that the rule changes amount to discrimination. Under the new rules, the full benefit will only be paid if under-16s of the same sex share a room, and under-10s will have to share regardless of gender. And the expectation is that this will apply to disabled youngsters too. But local councils will have the discretion to waive the cut in regard to some disabled households. And there is a £30m hardship fund, the money targeted at preventing people whose homes have been adapted to help them cope with disability from being forced to move. We don’t have much more detail on exactly what guidance has been issued to local authorities on who they spare from the cut, or how many disabled children are likely to be affected. And the £30m has to be seen in the context of the total benefits cut disabled people are expected to take. According to government impact assessments, 420,000 of the 660,000 people affected by the changes are disabled, and they will lose an average of £14 a week. That’s just under £306m a year.
So there is some money available and councils are expected to use some discretion, perhaps mitigating the impact for the most severely disabled, but there is no “exemption” for disabled children overall.
“People who need round-the-clock care are exempt.”
Wrong again. DWP has said that an extra bedroom is allowed if a disabled person has a live-in or overnight carer. But that doesn’t apply if the carer is also your partner or spouse. If you are disabled and your wife is also your full-time carer, but needs to sleep in a different room, you will still face a benefit cut. Again, you could be eligible for money from the hardship fund, but that doesn’t amount to an exemption to everyone who needs 24-hour care.”
Indeed, a high court judge has given Iain Duncan-Smith days to show why there should not be a judicial review of the government’s “spare bedroom tax”, amid concerns that disabled people will be disproportionately affected by the change in benefit rules. This legal challenge against the benefit reduction had been launched against Iain Duncan Smith on behalf of ten disabled and vulnerable children. The claimants were hoping for a judicial review to take place before the tax comes into effect on 1 April but in the high court on Tuesday, Mr Justice Mitting said that was too short a timescale. However, he indicated that if, after hearing the Department for Work and Pensions’ grounds against the challenge, he was satisfied that the judicial review should go ahead, a full hearing could take place in early May.
Conclusion: the Government’s answers may fool some of the legislature, but, most importantly, they do not fool many in the public, and are unlikely to fool the judiciary.
