Bedroom Tax – A Dummies Diary

I’m going to admit, I don’t have the slightest interest in politics. Whenever I research it for a story, I get confused and ultimately end up adding ‘for dummies’ to the end of whatever political subject I’ve typed into Google.

But my undying urge to want to understand led me to countless hours of research into the topic of ‘The Bedroom Tax’! And the first thing I learned? Not everyone had nice things to say about the situation! And understandably so, too!

The Bedroom Tax, or the ‘spare bedroom tax’, is a change to housing benefit entitlement, meaning that the receiver will get less benefits if they live in a house that has one or more spare bedroom(s). Basically, if there’s nobody sleeping in that room you store all those things you’re too afraid to throw away… you’re paying for it!

Having one spare bedroom will mean you lose 14% of your entitlement, while having two or more can lose you up to 25%! Which, for most people, is a lot of money to lose when you’re struggling to get by!

Like I said, I’m not a politics guy, I wish I was, but my questions during the research kept growing and growing, which led to more research. I also learned that the comments section on The Daily Mail is more hot headed and argumentative than the comments section to one of Miley Cyrus’ YouTube videos. But I couldn’t help but get a little bit peeved myself seeing comments from people who were struggling to extreme amounts.

I began to ask a few of my friends about what they thought of the bedroom tax situation, and here’s their feedback.

Facebook user Jack D’Souza-Toulson had this to say: “I totally understand the thought behind it. It moves people out of large, empty houses and moves families into them. But who is going to move house just because their benefits are affected? It does seem to be a bit of an excuse for the current government to cut benefits, and I don’t think they’ve fully thought it through. If you aren’t going to move house, surely you’ll find other ways to fill those empty rooms…”

Another Facebook user, James Lewis, says “I totally agree with it in principle. Why should someone live in a 3 bedroom if they only need 2 and getting the rent paid for it. However, thanks to the ‘buy your council house’ scheme, the number of council houses have dramatically dropped and have made it extremely difficult for the council to put people in appropriate houses. But unfortunately there is a shortage on housing and therefore I believe the bedroom tax is currently wrong as it’s not fair to punish the people who need help the most!”

But what do you think? Do you agree with any of the comments above or do you have your own opinions you’d like to put forward? Feel free to comment below and let everyone else know what you think!

Thanks!

– Josh