Bedroom tax.
The solution to our economic woes, according to George Osbourne, is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Former discraced tory MP Neil Hamilton explains. Even he gets it.
One such is the so-called bedroom tax, designed to free up under-occupied social housing. A single person living in a four-bed council house at a subsidised rent is wrong. It is also absurd for people such as ex-Labour Cabinet minister Frank Dobson MP or union chief Bob Crow, earning £133,000 a year, to be subsidised at all.
Removing part of the subsidy to encourage moving to a smaller property makes sense in theory but how will it work in practice?
Hard cases will hit the headlines, such as Richard Gorry. He, his wife and three children have a four-bed rented house. Two of the children are severely disabled by Down’s syndrome and spina bifida, meaning they cannot share a bedroom, but Government jobsworths insisted they should share and cut their housing benefit.
This idiotic decision was quashed by the Court of Appeal last August, though IDS’s department decided only last week against appealing further.
About 420,000 disabled people and 660,000 working-age tenants could be affected by the changes and the majority have only one extra bedroom, which could be too small for a bed for a teenager.
The social housing stock is limited and it will be virtually impossible for many tenants to downsize. Liverpool Mutual Homes calculates that 40 per cent of the city’s social homes have three bedrooms, 28 per cent have two and only 23.5 per cent, one. Director Angela Forshaw says: "Even if every tenant agreed to downsize it would take us seven years to offer them all a suitable alternative."
Many more fathers than mothers will be affected and the current proposals will prevent many parents seeing their children, for lack of anywhere to sleep on a visit. This will exacerbate the effects of family breakdown.
This policy will free only a small number of under-occupied houses but it will make a lot of poor people poorer, a cost disproportionate to any likely benefit.
express.co.uk |
