The Bedroom Tax
| Pages | 134-139 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Author | Peter Robson |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2015.0258 |
Changes to the rules on entitlement to social security benefits normally attract minimal media attention. The various radical changes wrought in the benefits for sick and disabled citizens in the past two decades occasioned minimal press comment and limited public reaction. So why did apparently minor tweaks to housing benefit, the means-tested benefit for low-income occupiers of social rented housing, occasion such a political and media outburst in 2013, when the same changes in the private rented sector attracted no attention? Henceforth the number of bedrooms a person has in their accommodation will affect the amount of financial assistance that can be claimed. Some context as to how this benefit came into existence and what problems it addresses helps explain why the change was so controversial. Legal education these days is not so narrow and rule-focused as to blind practitioners to the politics of technical regulations and why forms of resistance, including court strategies, can provide a focus for community empowerment. This use of the legal process as a rallying point for organisation has long been a feature within the politics of housing, most memorably with the Clydebank rent struggles of the 1920s.
S Damer,
Maintaining one's health is a necessity for any kind of civilised existence. Healthcare is, however, a costly commodity. When we suffer health problems in a profit-based economy there is provision for all through communal means. Housing is another of life's necessities. It, too, is expensive to provide particularly in a Scottish climate. The Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland
The purchase of low-cost housing was also subsidised from taxation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through such schemes as the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act 1899 and local authority mortgages. In addition, those with limited incomes have pooled their resources to provide housing via mutual associations such as traditional Building Societies. All shared the same goal: to provide a decent necessity at a price that could be afforded not just by the well-to-do. There were also crisis measures which affected the 90% of housing which 100 years ago was rented from private landlords. The temporary wartime solution in 1915 was to freeze rents and effectively have landlords subsidise their tenants in order to allow a focus on the war effort.
J Melling (ed),
Scottish Government,
The problem of ensuring that tenants are not exploited by the market has not been an issue in social rented housing where rents are fixed at levels which are broadly affordable. In...
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