brigadista
25th January 2013, 21:05
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/25/spare-bedroom-tax-contradiction-impossibility
The Holden family live on the end of a terraced street in the middle of Hartlepool. There are six of them: Stuart, 36, his wife Lorna, 33, and four kids: Faith, 8, Noah, 6, Elijah, 2, and Sam, 4.
You'd think of them as a thoroughly ordinary family, finding their way through the kind of trying circumstances that now seem to define the national condition, were it not for one detail: Sam, is autistic, and just starting to talk. "He was very non-verbal: shut off," Lorna tells me. "Now, he's starting to communicate what he wants. But it's still only one or two words at a time."
Stuart works a 9.30am-2.30pm shift at the HQ of Student Finance England in nearby Darlington, so as to be around for the more trying parts of the day. Though she aims to return to paid work once she's somehow got round the steep cost of childcare, Lorna – a native of Cambridge, who came to Hartlepool due to a past relationship – has recently been suffering from stress-related illness, as well as gall bladder problems. The family are entitled to £114 a week in housing benefit, which covers their five-bedroom home, rented from the Endeavour Housing Association. All the bedrooms are used: the smallest, they tell me, is a "sensory room" for Sam, where he can let off steam and be free of the overstimulation that can make autistic people extremely distraught.
Their house is sparsely-furnished and slowly being redecorated, with some laminate flooring paid for by Stuart's mum. It's eye-wateringly expensive to heat, they tell me – but since they moved here a few months ago from their previous three-bedroom home, Sam is apparently transformed: "He's like a different kid. He wants to be with you more, he brings you things to read or to look at," says Lorna. But there's a big problem looming. In April, the housing benefit paid to families like the Holdens will be changed by a new set of rules, outlined in last year's Welfare Reform Act.
What's about to arrive is widely known as the "spare bedroom tax", and is a central part of the government's radical changes to social security (which also include a planned real-terms cut in most working-age benefits). It's targeted at what officialspeak terms "under-occupation": if you live in social housing and are deemed to be one bedroom over, your housing benefit will be docked by 14%; if it's two or more, 25%. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people who live on very tight incomes are faced with a choice: either stay in their homes and somehow find the money, or move somewhere else.
For the Holdens, all this is very bad news indeed. With Sam and Elijah sleeping in the same room, and the other two kids each given a bedroom of their own, our initial conversation revolves around the assumption that they'll get a special dispensation for the sensory room – but the new rules still mean that, until daughter Faith turns 10, they'll be "under-occupying" by one bedroom, and therefore in line for a £16 a week hit. To some, that will not sound like much, but like so many families, they count every penny – and the extra money, Lorna tells me, will have to come out of their food budget, which currently runs to around £80 a week, and is largely spent on the budget lines Lorna calls "value food".
"Sam has very specific needs: there are lots of things that he needs – like nappies," says Lorna. "And we can't cut it from fuel, or electricity, or petrol. So when you lay that budget out over a month, with your council tax and water, and all your bills, there's nowhere else it can come from: the only place we can cut from is our food budget. And we're already having the cheapest food you can buy.
"I try and budget each day, like a daily allowance," she says. "So it'll just mean that when the yoghurt's gone, it's gone, and when the fruit's gone, it's gone. We'll just have to go without things: that's just the way it's going to have to be."
Towards the end of our conversation, there comes a grim twist. Contrary to their belief that they will only be penalised for one bedroom, the PR from the housing association raises the possibility that Sam's dedicated sensory room might be deemed to be "spare", meaning that the Holdens will be two bedrooms over their threshold, and faced with a hit of £28 a week.
Suddenly, Lorna looks panicked. How, I wonder, will they be able afford a cut of that size? "I don't think we could," she says.
The government's official blurb says the spare bedroom tax is intended to "contain growing housing benefit expenditure, encourage greater mobility within the social rented sector, make better use of available social housing stock, and improve work incentives for working-age claimants". It makes rules on housing let by councils and housing associations even tighter than similar regulations covering privately rented accommodation – and in that sense, drastically weakens the "social" aspect of so-called social housing.
The new regime is exacting, to say the least. If you're a separated or divorced couple who share the care of your children, only one of you will be allowed extra rooms; if the other keeps a bedroom for the kids, it'll still be deemed "spare". If a family contains two children of the same sex under 16, they must share, and the same will apply to mixed-sex children under 10. As the Holdens have discovered, whether a disabled child is entitled to a room of their own is a matter of some uncertainty, apparently being left to local authorities.
The Holden family live on the end of a terraced street in the middle of Hartlepool. There are six of them: Stuart, 36, his wife Lorna, 33, and four kids: Faith, 8, Noah, 6, Elijah, 2, and Sam, 4.
You'd think of them as a thoroughly ordinary family, finding their way through the kind of trying circumstances that now seem to define the national condition, were it not for one detail: Sam, is autistic, and just starting to talk. "He was very non-verbal: shut off," Lorna tells me. "Now, he's starting to communicate what he wants. But it's still only one or two words at a time."
Stuart works a 9.30am-2.30pm shift at the HQ of Student Finance England in nearby Darlington, so as to be around for the more trying parts of the day. Though she aims to return to paid work once she's somehow got round the steep cost of childcare, Lorna – a native of Cambridge, who came to Hartlepool due to a past relationship – has recently been suffering from stress-related illness, as well as gall bladder problems. The family are entitled to £114 a week in housing benefit, which covers their five-bedroom home, rented from the Endeavour Housing Association. All the bedrooms are used: the smallest, they tell me, is a "sensory room" for Sam, where he can let off steam and be free of the overstimulation that can make autistic people extremely distraught.
Their house is sparsely-furnished and slowly being redecorated, with some laminate flooring paid for by Stuart's mum. It's eye-wateringly expensive to heat, they tell me – but since they moved here a few months ago from their previous three-bedroom home, Sam is apparently transformed: "He's like a different kid. He wants to be with you more, he brings you things to read or to look at," says Lorna. But there's a big problem looming. In April, the housing benefit paid to families like the Holdens will be changed by a new set of rules, outlined in last year's Welfare Reform Act.
What's about to arrive is widely known as the "spare bedroom tax", and is a central part of the government's radical changes to social security (which also include a planned real-terms cut in most working-age benefits). It's targeted at what officialspeak terms "under-occupation": if you live in social housing and are deemed to be one bedroom over, your housing benefit will be docked by 14%; if it's two or more, 25%. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people who live on very tight incomes are faced with a choice: either stay in their homes and somehow find the money, or move somewhere else.
For the Holdens, all this is very bad news indeed. With Sam and Elijah sleeping in the same room, and the other two kids each given a bedroom of their own, our initial conversation revolves around the assumption that they'll get a special dispensation for the sensory room – but the new rules still mean that, until daughter Faith turns 10, they'll be "under-occupying" by one bedroom, and therefore in line for a £16 a week hit. To some, that will not sound like much, but like so many families, they count every penny – and the extra money, Lorna tells me, will have to come out of their food budget, which currently runs to around £80 a week, and is largely spent on the budget lines Lorna calls "value food".
"Sam has very specific needs: there are lots of things that he needs – like nappies," says Lorna. "And we can't cut it from fuel, or electricity, or petrol. So when you lay that budget out over a month, with your council tax and water, and all your bills, there's nowhere else it can come from: the only place we can cut from is our food budget. And we're already having the cheapest food you can buy.
"I try and budget each day, like a daily allowance," she says. "So it'll just mean that when the yoghurt's gone, it's gone, and when the fruit's gone, it's gone. We'll just have to go without things: that's just the way it's going to have to be."
Towards the end of our conversation, there comes a grim twist. Contrary to their belief that they will only be penalised for one bedroom, the PR from the housing association raises the possibility that Sam's dedicated sensory room might be deemed to be "spare", meaning that the Holdens will be two bedrooms over their threshold, and faced with a hit of £28 a week.
Suddenly, Lorna looks panicked. How, I wonder, will they be able afford a cut of that size? "I don't think we could," she says.
The government's official blurb says the spare bedroom tax is intended to "contain growing housing benefit expenditure, encourage greater mobility within the social rented sector, make better use of available social housing stock, and improve work incentives for working-age claimants". It makes rules on housing let by councils and housing associations even tighter than similar regulations covering privately rented accommodation – and in that sense, drastically weakens the "social" aspect of so-called social housing.
The new regime is exacting, to say the least. If you're a separated or divorced couple who share the care of your children, only one of you will be allowed extra rooms; if the other keeps a bedroom for the kids, it'll still be deemed "spare". If a family contains two children of the same sex under 16, they must share, and the same will apply to mixed-sex children under 10. As the Holdens have discovered, whether a disabled child is entitled to a room of their own is a matter of some uncertainty, apparently being left to local authorities.