Bedroom tax next April

Seems as if our leaders are introducing a bedroom tax for all recieving Housing Bemefit, a 14%cut in the amount paid if you have more bedrooms than occupants, a couple count as one bedroom, kids under 16 count as 1 bedroom, etc.

Under the Welfare Reform Act, due to be brought in next April, each person or couple in a household is allowed a bedroom, with children under 16 of the same gender and children under 10, regardless of gender, expected to share.

Any household deemed to have more bedrooms than required will lose 14% of their housing benefit for one, or 25% for two rooms

and youre expected to downsize and move to a smaller home or pay the extra to your landlord.

Yep. I work in housing and trust me this will be chaos. The only saving grace is that it won’t affect u if you’re over 60.

What about bikes? Three = one bedroom?

Yet again, the Tories putting the ‘n’ in cuts.

Bike tax next

Lol
😀

Given I receive no benefits and cannot afford a spare bedroom I don’t see this as unreasonable. We’re also thinking about moving to a cheaper area as money is tight.

If I’m subsidising someone else to stay in better accommodation than I can afford then is it wrong for me to support this policy?

One problem I see though – if children are expected to share rooms (no bad thing in and of itself) bedrooms in a lot of new builds are tiny. We have two boys and I don’t think their beds and a single wardrobe would fit in either of their bedrooms and leave enough space for both to stand.

No thread could have illustrated the plight of the ‘striver’, the ‘bloated lazy public sector’ and the ‘benefits scrounger’ so perfectly and succinctly in less than 10 posts.

😀

great idea..

what this does is penalise those seeking homes that are larger than those who work could afford and what it will do is lower rents and free up larger houses for those that need them.

and frankly why should anyone working have to pay extra to live in a big home when you would nt if you were on benifits as the govt pays your rent..

whats wrong with kids sharing rooms?

Doesn’t it just encourage people to have more kids? Or am I looking at it too simplistically!? 🙂

Social housing is built to the homes and communites agency’s scheme development standards which include minimum space standards.

The problem with this policy is that housing is inelastic of supply, ie. it takes 3 years minimum from the point someone thinks we’ll build some houses to the point when people move in, and in many areas the property profile won’t match the demands put on it by the new policy. So for example this will put huge pressure on 1 and 2 bed units. Most Local Planning Authorities havent allowed 1 bed new build units for years bceause they are seen as unsustainable. It actually doesnt increase your build cost much to build a 2 bed instead of a 1 bed anyway because the footprint is virtually the same so we now have a lot of 2 beds in many areas, a lot of course is relative. How is that now going to help a single man? With a lack of suitable property to downsize to what you’re talking about here is a policy that will force the absolute poorest in our society to subsidies their rent from the pittance they get in unemployment benefit. I’m sorry you are having to move Tony but I guess you ate tonight.

How is that now going to help a single man?

single bed flat? why does someone without a family need a house?

As I said 1 bed flats haven’t been built by housing associations for years. I wasn’t talking about a house I said a 1 or 2 bed unit. A unit being a dwelling, be that a flat a house or a bungalow

Yep. I work in housing and trust me this will be chaos. The only saving grace is that it won’t affect u if you’re over 60.

Why is it a saving grace – according to the above, a couple with 3 boys will be expected to live in a 2 bed flat, yet a pensioner living on her own can have a 3 bed house 🙄

Well two wrongs don’t make a right but you have a point.

As I said 1 bed flats haven’t been built by housing associations for years.

Really? I just googled and there are lots of housing associations with new 1 bed flats/apartments.

Everything is relative, there arent enough

On a related matter…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9596251/Abu-Hamzas-wife-asked-to-leave-1m-council-house.html

anyone can CLAIM HOUSING BENEFIT, DEPENDENT ON INCOME,Working or not, and it also affects privately rented accomodation as well.

So the government is looking to make sure it gets best value from housing benefit and gets best use of the housing stock.

IE Move people out of 3 bed properties after kids have left home etc.

Frees up money and bigger houses for those on the waiting list.

As above the state should support the minimum required when the economy is down the pan.

Are they going to penalise people even if there’s no other accommodation with the correct number of bedrooms available?

May be helpful for reducing the bill for the long-term unemployed, providing the houses are available for them to move into as circumstances change.

The problem is that the electorate think that welfare = scroungers (long term unemployed), when probably the majority who are on some form of welfare or benefit will be not be long term unemployed but low-income, disabled, key workers, or short term unemployed. However, because the electorate thinks welfare = scroungers, then conservative policy is set up to punish the minority of scroungers with no thought to what effect it has on other welfare claimants.

Just need to look at Cameron’s reluctance to apply any of these cuts to the elderly, even to the very richest, for example by applying this scheme to over 60s, or by means testing winter fuel allowance. Elderly people and the rich are his key electorate.

How does someone with a very limited income afford the deposit to move house?
I am of course making the ludicrous assumption the stock exists

I think the children under 10 sharing idea is flawed. I don’t think girls who have started puberty (i.e. menstruation) should be sharing a bedroom with a brother.

And how do ‘step’ siblings count?

Do you know of many nine year old girls having periods then?

Not saying it never happens, but few and far between surely 😕

I see absolutely nothing wrong with this, I work bloody hard and so does my wife we have 9 yr old twins. If we were on housing benefit we’d be automagically upgraded to a 3 bed house, as we work 60hrs plus a week each we are treated worse and don’t get the benefit.

If only people realised they are entitled to **** and and should work for it the sooner we’ll all be better off. And no I’m not rolling in it, struggling by self employed with SO as a civil servant, yet we take home less than one woman I know who adopts 1 kid!#

We take home £2k a month on a good month

She has one kid, fosters another, has rent paid of £700 c/tax of £120 and a take home wage of £1900! wtf is the world coming to?

Single parent gets £2720 yet two bloody hard working parents to two kids get less? Tony Blair has fecked things up for generations, you are entitled to sh1t all unless mentally of physically need it, otherwise do what i do, scrape by.

Pisses me right off when I do odd jobs like fix gravestones, groundwork etc to get by.

Junkyard’s point is the most interesting to me. Low earners would be forced to choose between a large % drop in their income or trying to save a similar amount towards moving. Having a massive amount of demand at the same time for smaller properties must surely be good news for landlords though 😉

Can always rent out the spare room to a lodger of course – and I believe they’ve also changed the rules so that someone on benefits can keep a greater proportion of any rent received, without losing their benefits.

Tosh- all benefits are means tested, this is another attack on the poor, i say free up all those big houses with multiple rooms that are not used, second homes are not needed, you can only live in one, its time to abolish all forms of private ownership, make life simple– you live somewhere,you die, someone else has a home– game shows to decide who gets what, Queen v Single mum at darts, or dog tricks, yeah crazy man– i’m going to birmingham , seems like plenty of people hangin there this week with similar ideas

Nothing wrong with minimum but reasonable benefits but they have to go hand in hand with lots of other measures ie assistance to those who want ti work, a severe kick uo the arse to those who don’t (imho everybody should work in some way for all benefits as it helps counter the ‘ no financial benefit in working’ and fairly taxing the better off. Right now too much looks like tory ideology and targeting the poor cos they’re an easy target and a vote winner in times of austerity. Guessing this won’t save billions…. Ps why did any council ever allocate housing on a one size for life basis?!

She has one kid, fosters another, has rent paid of £700 c/tax of £120 and a take home wage of £1900! wtf is the world coming to?

Those figures don’t seem right to me. She’s above the limit for the universal benefit, no? And way above any specific limits for HB that I can find. These mention a limit of about £300. Are you sure your figures are correct?

I think this is fair enough – the housing benefit system has descended into a complete farce if there’s even a shred of truth in these articles:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/budget/7846978/Budget-2010-Afghan-family-receives-150000-per-year-in-housing-benefits.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2188075/Jobless-mother-seven-insists-family-deserve-1-25MILLION-taxpayer-funded-home-trashed.html

So the proposal is – have a tramp move into the spare room or loose 14% in housing benifit.

No mansion tax though.

“We are all in this together” apparently.

And to robdixon re the links – it is exactly this sort of dross in the right wing press about a tiny number of extreme cases that gets people thinking of benifit scroungers.

housing, a social issue, where people live, community, if you think that should be treated like some piece of clothing… you have not given it much thought. Alienation is a big problem with rootless communities, leading to many social problems down the line, there is a consensus among those who are involved, that strong and stable communities are in everyones interests–i know this is a cycle forum offshoot, but have a think

The UK already has the smallest homes in western Europe due to an obsession with room numbers, the size of a child’s bedroom in a newbuild in London wouldn’t be fit to be called a cupboard in Germany, to force two teenagers into cubby hole is ridiculous.

It’s just another example of Tories not understanding the lives those on the breadline actually live.

Junkyard – Member

I am of course making the ludicrous assumption the stock exists

It’s gonna be musical houses LOL

Even if you agree with the idea in principle, its gonna be way too complicated to implement & for that reason alone it should be binned. I always thought the social housing where you paid rent according to income was a good model – naturally created turnover as people became more well off they would move on to private rented or buy their own home as what they got for their money in social housing became less appealing the more money they earned.

The more I see of the tories’ latest wheezes, the more I think they all originated from Stewart Pearson’s ‘mind camp’ in The Thick of It.

“Get the Unemployed to drive Ambulances!”
“Yes and Ho!”

Due to the state of the nations finances, left to us by the previous government, we can no longer afford our overly generous social security system.

Ultimately, we will need to house unemployed people, and their families, all in one large building together. But so they don’t feel too alienated, we’ll still use the traditional parlance and refer to it as a ‘house‘

And as they will be there while they actively seek ‘work‘, that should also figure in the title. Maybe as a prefix. Maybe they could even be compelled to do said ‘work‘ while we graciously allow them to stay there

Blue sky thinking, you see

Who defines how many bedrooms a house has?

Could you knock two rooms through into one to reduce the number of bedrooms a house has? and then put a ‘temporary’ partition up to separate the rooms again?

I think changes do need to be made, the benefits system should be a safety net not a lifestyle choice, but this sounds frought with difficulties/workarounds like the old window tax..