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It’s not a “Bedroom tax” its a spare room subsidy.
If there’s one thing it really is not, it’s a spare room subsidy!
Go to a search engine and type in something like “Vox Political Bedroom Tax”. You’ll get a list of articles. Read them until you find my explanation of why the Bedroom Tax most certainly IS a bedroom tax, and why it isn’t a spare room subsidy.
You will learn something, I promise.
It is a bedroom tax, what is a spare room subsidy then , if not a tax. I am in a private rent and i am charged £13.60 per week for each son that lives with me, and this is because they are over 18yrs of age, but if they sign on i would not have to pay this, its stupid and ridicules. So even i am paying bedroom tax but in a different way. And yes i do work but i am on minimum wage so cant pay all my rent. And my son’s cant find a job and its not for want of trying, but i will not allow them to sign on and become slaves to big corporate companies. If they raised the minimum wage i would not need to claim any of my rent, also if my son’s could find work we would be fine, so would it not make sense to raise minimum wages and less people would claim benefits. I will soon lose my home because benefits try to make you pay ridicules amounts of rent that you can not possibly afford to pay or would have nothing left for food and basics. So i work for nothing really, i slog my guts out and at end of day i see nothing my my efforts how is this right or effective and how is bedroom tax effective, it is not
There is no such thing as a spare room subsidy. It never existed.
It certainly isn’t a term that can be used interchangeably with ‘Bedroom Tax’. The SRS, if it had existed, would have been an extra amount paid TO people, on top of their Housing Benefit, because they had more rooms than they needed. This is a nonsense in itself – no local authority would ever give people extra money because they already had more than they needed. Thought of in this way alone, the whole concept is a nonsense. For there to have been a Spare Room Subsidy, there would have to have been a law enacted that brought it into being. No such law exists.
Now, when Tories discuss this so-called Spare Room Subsidy, they really mean the removal of it. This is also impossible; you can’t remove something that never existed.
So you see, the concept of a ‘Spare Room Subsidy’ is completely and utterly ridiculous.
The correct title is ‘State Underoccupation Charge’ – because it is a charge levied on social housing tenants for rooms they are not using.
I have already discussed elsewhere why it is (rightly) described as a Bedroom Tax.