Dear Sir,
On Saturday – along with a number of local Labour MPs, councillors and trade unionists – I attended a rally in Durham City Market Place to protest against the so-called ‘bedroom tax’.
Nobody is pretending that there isn’t a housing crisis, or even that there isn’t a problem with under-occupancy, but a bedroom tax is the wrong way to deal with these problems.
The anomalies and injustices in the proposed tax are many, and I can explain them to you if you want to contact me. They boil down to the fact that indiscriminately forcing numbers of poor people into inappropriate housing will only add to our housing problems, not solve them.
Perversely, if it succeeds in harassing people on housing benefit out of their homes, the bedroom tax will cost the country £billions in extra housing benefit. There are no smaller houses in the social housing sector – so the only place for people to go will be the private sector, where rents (even for smaller houses) are higher.
The ‘bedroom tax’, as most Tory measures, hinges simply on the prejudice that – if you drive people on benefits to suicidal despair – somehow the problems will go away. Let’s be honest: the ‘bedroom tax’ is just another Tory trick yet again to blame and bash people on benefits, and to turn people’s attention away from their failure to build enough houses.
So, whilst there may well be some mileage in a less-brutal measure to reduce unnecessary under-occupancy, the only permanent and socially just answer to the housing crisis is to provide more houses. Until we have a government brave enough to do that, we need to lobby our local councils to explore and develop zero-cost initiatives to expand housing provision.
In the meantime, the ‘bedroom tax’ is a failed measure, which will not solve the problem and will bring only untold misery, and we need to stand up and say ‘no’. You could write to your MP, but he already opposes it. Perhaps the best thing you can do is to join the online campaign at http://bit.ly/38bedroom.
John D Clare
