The Bedroom Tax is hurting more people – worse – than planned. Expect more suicides
![Iain Duncan Smith was the architect of the hated Bedroom Tax [Image: Jack Taylor/Getty Images].](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/160722-Iain-Duncan-Smith-bedroom-tax.jpg)
Iain Duncan Smith was the architect of the hated Bedroom Tax [Image: Jack Taylor/Getty Images].
Now the Conservative government has admitted that 57,485 households are behind with their rent because of the benefit cut.
And another 24,000 are in arrears because of Universal Credit or the benefit cap – both imposed by the Conservatives.
The Tories aren’t brave enough to admit these facts openly – they hid the evidence in their English Housing Survey for 2014/15 – a document containing figures that are more than a year old.
Who knows how much worse the situation has become since?
One certainty is that Theresa May’s new version of Conservatism couldn’t care less – just like the last version.
Tories call it “culling the stock”.
More than 57,000 people fell behind on their rent in just one year after being hit by the Bedroom Tax, damning new figures revealed today.
Data buried deep in the government’s 2014/15 English Housing Survey shows the vast toll of people hit by Iain Duncan Smith’s most controversial policy.
When the survey was taken 364,000 households in social housing were in rent arrears. Another 348,000 had been behind on rent in the previous year.
Among those, 22% (153,800 households) blamed problems or cuts in their benefits.
And 37% of that group (57,485 households) said they had benefits cut for ‘under-occupying’ their home – the hated bedroom tax.
The report was slipped out in a mountain of more than 300 documents on the day MPs leave Westminster for their six-week summer holiday.
Another 24,000 people in social housing fell behind on rent due to new systems like Universal Credit or the benefits cap.
Figures revealed earlier this year showed the Bedroom Tax is now costing each victim £66 a year more than Iain Duncan Smith’s department first predicted.
The cost to 442,000 home was around £794 a year, compared to £728 in the official impact assessment dated 2013/14.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) blamed the difference on rent rises over the past two years – but Labour said it proved once again why the tax should be scrapped.
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They should be renamed The Evil Party – nasty just doesn’t describe them properly.
all part of their master plan or i hear others stating never but its happening daily far too many souls are lost to their aktion t4 plans whot else to you call it rtu ids said stock culling the stock ouch yet more and more are dying while they all talk about it sounds like early germany doesnt it
The figures don’t really show the true horror. i.e., social tenants who are not in arrears but are driven into much greater poverty by having to use money earmarked for food and heating to make up the shortfall in rent caused by the Bedroom Tax. Actually it’s even worse than that. Beside
Hs the Bedroom Tax many local authorities now demand that people on benefits have to pay a portion of their Council Tax (usually 25%) for the first time, again out of money supposedly to be used for living expenses. And the worst of it is that there is nowhere for them to “downsize” to in most circumstances: all of the one bedroom properties, in the bottom 30th percentile of rents, which are not subject to the welfare cap have already been snapped up by the first tranche of those displaced from their homes by the Bedroom Tax.
Awful really.
Money supposed to be used to buy food, drink and pay for essentials already too low for that purpose, has to be used to pay the Bedroom Tax and Council Tax leaving many people who have no power to change their circumstances with no heat in winter and inadequate food and drink to properly nourish a person all the year round. I have met people driven to ridiculous behaviours like saving their bath water to flush the lavatory to cut their water bill and eating uncooked food as their staple diet in order to save money on gas and/or electric as far as cooking goes.One lady joked about the “Universal Credit diet” and how she lost a couple of stone in weight since she lost her job, something she had tried to do before and ailed when she had the means to eat healthily. She was stick thin when I spoke to her so I doubt that she was much overweight when previously employed.
Really bad all in all and responsible for much suffering.
Do we know what Labour would do about these injustices if by some miracle it was elected to office in 2020?
Under Jeremy Corbyn?
Labour would scrap the Bedroom Tax.
What a pity that such a thing won’t happen then.
Labour supported the bedroom tax, had the chance to block it, like the Lib dems too but both of them decided not to, so they are as much to blame as the scumbag tories, IDS is a worthless, sadistic failure of a politician and a human being but he’ll be remembered for this nightmare for many years to come, the tories will be happy to hear more people are struggling with the payments of the BT and more will kill themselves because of it, they will be popping the bubbly when they hear the death figures roll in!
I agree New Labour were Tory-lite, but they did speak up more against the bedroom tax. Surely even Ed Milliband said he would scrap it prior to the last general election?