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| Bedroom tax? It's not a policy but the product of a Bad Bullingdon Weekend | Bedroom tax? It's not a policy but the product of a Bad Bullingdon Weekend |
| (about 3 hours later) | |
| Nobody needed a UN special rapporteur to tell us to scrap the bedroom tax, though I would hope it would bring some people up short to discover that Raquel Rolnik's last mission was to tell the Indonesian government to do something about their slum housing – and by sheer coincidence I have been to a Jakartan slum this year, wooden crates abutting each other, windowless, about enough room to keep a bed and pass it on one side, and – here's the kicker – toilets that you had to pay to use. So the number one medical problem was babies dying of diarrhoea; the second was their mothers getting kidney infections because they tried to urinate only once a day. | Nobody needed a UN special rapporteur to tell us to scrap the bedroom tax, though I would hope it would bring some people up short to discover that Raquel Rolnik's last mission was to tell the Indonesian government to do something about their slum housing – and by sheer coincidence I have been to a Jakartan slum this year, wooden crates abutting each other, windowless, about enough room to keep a bed and pass it on one side, and – here's the kicker – toilets that you had to pay to use. So the number one medical problem was babies dying of diarrhoea; the second was their mothers getting kidney infections because they tried to urinate only once a day. |
| Stories of great hardship abroad have typically stimulated those on the right to say: "There, you family suffering overcrowding in Croydon, call that squalor? It could be so squalid that it killed you." But when a person fresh from a classic slum visits Manchester and declares herself "very shocked", surely even that brigade would stop and think. | Stories of great hardship abroad have typically stimulated those on the right to say: "There, you family suffering overcrowding in Croydon, call that squalor? It could be so squalid that it killed you." But when a person fresh from a classic slum visits Manchester and declares herself "very shocked", surely even that brigade would stop and think. |
| Nobody, furthermore, needed to be told that the policy was inhuman, but I, at least, was surprised that this was a human rights issue. With the housing market so aerated, with most people so comprehensively excluded from it, with prices that have become laughable and private-sector rents that reflect what housing benefit will stretch to, rather than what the property is worth – in short, with this commodity having become so out of kilter with any meaningful concept of monetary "value", I had forgotten that shelter played a part in a human rights agenda. It's like being told we have a human right to myrrh. | Nobody, furthermore, needed to be told that the policy was inhuman, but I, at least, was surprised that this was a human rights issue. With the housing market so aerated, with most people so comprehensively excluded from it, with prices that have become laughable and private-sector rents that reflect what housing benefit will stretch to, rather than what the property is worth – in short, with this commodity having become so out of kilter with any meaningful concept of monetary "value", I had forgotten that shelter played a part in a human rights agenda. It's like being told we have a human right to myrrh. |
| But leaving aside the wider housing problem for today, the bedroom tax policy has, from its outset,, from the moment of its rechristening been riven with injustice, irrationality, perverse incentives and unintended consequences – tainted with social conditioning and the cleansing of whole areas of poverty. Its stated intent was to tackle under-occupancy, get single people out of three-bedroomed houses and thereby accommodate more families. It tinkered with the rules somewhat – siblings of the same gender had to share a room until they were 16, siblings under 10 share a room regardless of gender – but the main lever was cost. | But leaving aside the wider housing problem for today, the bedroom tax policy has, from its outset,, from the moment of its rechristening been riven with injustice, irrationality, perverse incentives and unintended consequences – tainted with social conditioning and the cleansing of whole areas of poverty. Its stated intent was to tackle under-occupancy, get single people out of three-bedroomed houses and thereby accommodate more families. It tinkered with the rules somewhat – siblings of the same gender had to share a room until they were 16, siblings under 10 share a room regardless of gender – but the main lever was cost. |
| A person on housing benefit would be deducted 14% of it for one extra room and 25% of it for two. Since, by dint of being on housing benefit, this group was pretty safely identified as not having 14% of anything to spare in their budget, the choice was not a choice in the traditional sense: it wasn't move, or pay extra. It was move, or get into catastrophic debt and end up being evicted. | A person on housing benefit would be deducted 14% of it for one extra room and 25% of it for two. Since, by dint of being on housing benefit, this group was pretty safely identified as not having 14% of anything to spare in their budget, the choice was not a choice in the traditional sense: it wasn't move, or pay extra. It was move, or get into catastrophic debt and end up being evicted. |
| Fine, move then – except that the smaller properties for people to move into didn't exist (at one point there was an estimated 19:1 demand ratio for one-bedroomed properties). So now the choice was to move into a non-existent property or pay more of your non-existent money. There are many other, more technical problems with it – for a magisterial overview, check out Joe Halewood's blog, SPeye – but the main coverage has been of the individual cases where the tax has caused hardship so extreme that it boggles your mind. | |
| People have been evicted for having an extra bedroom where the bedroom is spare because their child has just died; or their adult child has been killed in action; or they needed the room for their dialysis machine and, since they are on dialysis, have very little chance of boosting their income to pay for it. And those cases are outrageous, and deserve coverage, and muster public opinion against the tax, and are possibly what brought the UN here in the first place. | People have been evicted for having an extra bedroom where the bedroom is spare because their child has just died; or their adult child has been killed in action; or they needed the room for their dialysis machine and, since they are on dialysis, have very little chance of boosting their income to pay for it. And those cases are outrageous, and deserve coverage, and muster public opinion against the tax, and are possibly what brought the UN here in the first place. |
| But what they centrally show is a nonchalant villainy on the part of the government, which doesn't bring us any closer to an understanding of its method. The crucial thing about this policy, the really illuminating thing, is that it is impossible. Sure, some people have managed to move, and the start of the school year has, I'm sure, thrown up for anyone who ever hangs around a school the spectre of the children who have moved into cheaper boroughs. No doubt they'll be fine, and there are good schools everywhere, but there is something eerie about letting them disappear, shrugging your shoulders and telling yourself they left their outstanding primary school in the middle of their education because they chose to do so. | But what they centrally show is a nonchalant villainy on the part of the government, which doesn't bring us any closer to an understanding of its method. The crucial thing about this policy, the really illuminating thing, is that it is impossible. Sure, some people have managed to move, and the start of the school year has, I'm sure, thrown up for anyone who ever hangs around a school the spectre of the children who have moved into cheaper boroughs. No doubt they'll be fine, and there are good schools everywhere, but there is something eerie about letting them disappear, shrugging your shoulders and telling yourself they left their outstanding primary school in the middle of their education because they chose to do so. |
| Anyway, I digress. Some people have moved but most haven't, and those people will eventually find their debts unmanageable and become homeless. This cannot come as news to the devisers of the policy, and if it is not news to them then it must be part of their plan. There is a story of legend (by which I mean it is a true story but I'm not allowed to say who said it), in which the head of a charity challenged an idea from Steve Hilton, then director of strategy for David Cameron, on the basis of how it worked with statutory responsibility. "You've got to forget statutory responsibility," he replied. "Statutory is over. The state is over." Hilton has, of course, left to go and be insane elsewhere. | Anyway, I digress. Some people have moved but most haven't, and those people will eventually find their debts unmanageable and become homeless. This cannot come as news to the devisers of the policy, and if it is not news to them then it must be part of their plan. There is a story of legend (by which I mean it is a true story but I'm not allowed to say who said it), in which the head of a charity challenged an idea from Steve Hilton, then director of strategy for David Cameron, on the basis of how it worked with statutory responsibility. "You've got to forget statutory responsibility," he replied. "Statutory is over. The state is over." Hilton has, of course, left to go and be insane elsewhere. |
| But that aspect hangs over the government: what they would call "creative chaos" and we would call a Bad Bullingdon Weekend. Destroy things, and see what's left. Inevitably, some people will be picked up by charities, some by local communities. Some people will go under, and the state will have sloughed them off. The UN and judicial review process and the third sector can say what they like. The state will be over. Yet in checkmating people with the bedroom tax, and in doing it so plainly, they have checkmated themselves. The state is not over – not until the fat electorate sings. | But that aspect hangs over the government: what they would call "creative chaos" and we would call a Bad Bullingdon Weekend. Destroy things, and see what's left. Inevitably, some people will be picked up by charities, some by local communities. Some people will go under, and the state will have sloughed them off. The UN and judicial review process and the third sector can say what they like. The state will be over. Yet in checkmating people with the bedroom tax, and in doing it so plainly, they have checkmated themselves. The state is not over – not until the fat electorate sings. |
| Twitter: @zoesqwilliams | Twitter: @zoesqwilliams |