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I had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in London and I had just lived there for a month when I got ill. The landlord was a friend and colleague of mine and we had come to an agreement about the rent and what was and wasn't included but he hadn't given me a tenancy agreement yet. I had asked him about it but he hadn't had the time to put it into writing but he promised I would get it before the end of the month. Short before the end of that month my boss called me asking me when I was coming back to work again. I explained the situation and that I was due to get surgery the following week and that recovery would approximately be 4–6 weeks. She told me she would get someone from an agency to cover for me until I was fully recovered but a few days after the surgery I received a letter from her that since I couldn't give her an exact date for my return to work she had no choice but to let me go. I got in touch with the Citizens Advice Bureau and apparently she was in her right to let me go while I was on sick leave. So I had to apply for benefits until I would be able to look for another job. I told my landlord that I needed the tenancy agreement for my application for housing benefits. He wasn't happy that I was going to apply for benefits but I told him since I wasn't living there for free I had no choice. So reluctantly he said he would have the tenancy agreement ready the following day. And true to his word I got it with the mail the next day. He had added a note that I had to sign one copy and return that to him. Before signing I read it and the first thing I noticed was that instead of the £700 per month we had agreed on he had put in the agreement that the rent was £850 per calendar month. We had also agreed that the rent would be included water and council tax but according to the tenancy agreement the rent was NOT including anything. If I would sign it I would have to pay him £850 per month and I would be responsible for the water and council tax bills. Of course I wasn't going to sign so I called him to let him know. He said that since I was going to apply for housing benefits it wouldn't make a difference for me if the rent was £700 or £850 because the council would pay my rent. I replied that I wasn't going to stay on benefits forever and that if I signed it and then find a new job after recovering I was stuck with the higher rent. He said he would come in the following weekend to discuss the situation with me. I had an appointment at the job centre for my application so I took the unsigned tenancy agreement and told them what the landlord had done. He didn't get the £850 rent he claimed but he made sure the water and council tax bills were signed over to my name. Apparently a landlord can just to that and even though an oral agreement is binding I couldn't prove that those bills were supposed to be included in the rent so I was left responsible for paying those bills.It would soon become clear to me that he was the worst landlord I ever had because things only got worse. It's needless to say our friendship came to an end.

Contrary to popular belief, most Tories are fair minded decent people. If you ask most of them about the bedroom tax all they know is the official “It’s just bringing the public sector in line with the private sector”.When you actually explain it to them, most are horrified at the effects of it, because lets be honest here, only the left wing media has reported any of the cases. That has to stop. Everyone has to be made aware of the hardship and pain that this is causing.With more welfare cuts in the pipeline it’s time for a real debate about what is and isn’t fair, but that discussion is for another post.So let’s look at the under occupancy charge. Supporters of the changes have referred to the unreformed system as a “spare room subsidy” whereby tax-payers are said to be subsidising social housing tenants living in houses larger than their needs require, with the said intention of the policy being to reduce these costs and ease housing shortages and overcrowding. Supposedly the rationale of the policy is to encourage council tenants living in houses too big for their needs to move to smaller properties so that existing housing stock can be better used.Research by the BBC suggests that only 6% of those affected have moved. Mainly this is because there is no where to move to. There are very few 1 bed properties in the social sector partly because the difference between the cost of building a one and a two bedroom property are so small that it is better to provide the accommodation that is more flexible. Currently huge numbers of couples and single people find themselves in a two bed property that was what they were offered by the council. Many of these are in high rise flats where the councils have made the decision that the houses were not suitable for families, so have used them as housing for people who only need a one bedroom property.New Government figures show the number of empty three and four bedroom properties increased from 25,462 in 2012-13 to 26,958 in 2013-14 when the tax was introduced. As a result lost rental income went up from £107million to £127million, and some authorities are considering demolishing empty homes.A second rationale made by the Department for Work and Pensions is to reduce the overall housing benefit bill. If you are decreed to be under occupying your house by one bedroom then you lose 14% by two you lose 25%.On the face of it that sounds quite reasonable. Why indeed should spare rooms be paid for at the expense of the taxpayer? The problem comes with the definition of what constitutes a spare room, and the idea that it is just bringing it in line with the private sector.According to some research two thirds of those affected claim some form of disability benefit. Many sleep in a separate room from their partner because of it. Many use the spare room for their disability equipment. Many have had a small fortune spent on adapting their homes to suit, yet none of these things were originally taken into account.If an extra room is required for a carer to stay overnight that is accepted if the person requiring care is the claimant or their partner, but not if it is one of their children even when they become an adult. After cases that went to the supreme court there have been some successes where a disabled person was accepted as needing a separate room and the issue of a carer for a child were accepted as requirements, but like all court cases these are individual decisions and although they create a precedent, it doesn’t mean the local authoritywill accept it without a challenge. See With and without foundation - Bedroom tax in Supreme Court - Nearly Legal: Housing Law News and CommentOn the subject of children, the rules are now that two children under the age of ten must share a room irrespective of sex, and if same sex must share a room till 16. This is quite different from the housing allocation policies of many authorities. Many authorities will allocate a bedroom per child if there is more than a 4 year age gap, so the housing authority would not expect a 3 year old boy to share with his 12 year old brother, however according to the under occupancy rules that would mean that the household were over accommodated.Most authorities will also take a shared residence order into account when allocating a home, but there is no recognition of the huge numbers of parents sharing care of their children when it comes to the bedroom tax. Only the parent receiving the child benefit can claim that their children live with them. The damage this has done is incalculable. I know of numerous fathers that have been forced into accommodation where their children can no longer stay overnight, causing tears and trauma to the children involved.Until the subject of benefits where there is shared care is addressed this will remain a problem. You would imagine that if two children each spend half their time with each parent, then it would make sense for the child benefit to be split between parents, however the official line is that it is awarded based on who has primary care of the children, and where the children spend equal time with each parent, that is decided by the address for school, usually the Mother’s. Of course where there are two children, the parents could each claim for one, but unless they do it in agreement with each other, the decision always favours the mother.That covers some of the questions of whether a room is spare or not. Now lets look at the assertion that it is just bringing the public sector in line with the private sector.Firstly the private rented sector is quite different from the social housing sector. If you rent privately you know that you are in a short term let which, after the initial six months, you can be given a months notice to leave at any time. You have no security of tenure and normally you can’t redecorate or make any changes to the house. You know and accept that in the private sector any move is temporary. You simply don’t expect to be in the same place for long.In the social sector, after a probationary period, you do have security of tenure, you can redecorate and, with permission, make improvements to your home. The social sector has always been seen as a home for life, and people treat it that way often over the years spending many thousands of pounds on their home and garden. Frequently as families grow up and leave home they will get houses on the same estate so there is a support network for everyone living there. On most council estates there is a real sense of community.Now lets look at the way rents are dealt with. Since 2008 rents in the private sector are calculated in bands called Local Housing Allowance rates or LHA.Initially if a tenant could find a cheaper property than the applicable rate, they were allowed to keep the difference. That stopped in 2009. The changes were Labour’s attempt to control the spiralling housing benefit bill, but instead they dramatically increased rents payable for the larger homes. Overall they restricted housing benefit to the median rate for an area, i.e. the LHA was set at a rate that would cover the rent for 50% of the properties available in an area. Previously housing benefit covered any fair rent for the property claimed for, so it didn’t matter how much the rent was as long as it was deemed to be a fair rent.Now the coalition government lowered the LHA rates to only cover 30% of the properties in a broad market area. This means that the amount payable for a two bed property varies from £85 a week in West Pennine to £300 a week in Central London.In the area I live in the LHA rate for a one bedroom house is £91.38 a week or £395 a month. The council rent for a two bedroom house is around £74 a week or £320 a month. If you happen to be a single dad with shared care of your two children renting privately you need to find a two bed where the rent is less than the one bedroom rate of £395 which isn’t that hard to do. In fact on the estate I live on there are ex council houses available at that price. Admittedly they are unmodernised, still having gas wall heaters rather than central heating, but perfectly adequate. So a single father who is not in receipt of child benefit living in a two bed council house will have 14% of his rent ignored for housing benefit purposes, so will have to find £10.36 a week off his JSA of roughly £75, so the housing benefit payable is £275 a month. If he then moves to the privately rented house the HB payable is the full £395. So if he moves to affordable accommodation the bill to the taxpayer rises by £120 a month. Even if he moves from 2 bed council to 1 bed private the HB payable is going to rise. Where is the sense in that? It certainly doesn’t look as if people moving to a smaller house is going to save any money unless they can stay within the social sector, and those homes simply don’t exist.If the desire is truly to make the most of the available housing stock, then it doesn’t make sense to exempt pensioners as they are the people most likely to have spare rooms. In some areas councils have schemes where they pay a bounty to anyone moving to a smaller house, sometimes as much as £1800 a room plus help with removal and redecorating expenses. Wouldn’t that be far more likely to create a better use of housing stock than the punitive under occupancy charges?The realities of this legislation is it cannot achieve any of the supposed objectives!

They do not judge low-income families for wanting more children if they are willing and able to provide for them. They are unhappy when low-income families have more children when they cannot afford to care for the ones that they already have.I am from the United Kingdom, and here we have a slightly more generous welfare state than other parts of the world. Prior to 2017, you could claim child benefits, child tax credits, as well as get reductions on council tax and housing benefits. This was worked out per child, and the more children you had often the more money that you were able to claim. In 2017 this changed to only include 2 children per household. This means that parents can only rely on the state to provide child tax credits and housing benefit for up to two children (child benefit and council tax reduction is unchanged.This rule applies to any child born after April 6th 2017. Any children born before this date are exempt from the rule. There are also other exceptions to the rule in order to cover rape and multiple births. This was implemented by the UK government in power at the time - the Conservatives. They are the political party that is more to the right of the political spectrum Many of their voters took issue with the benefits system in place for multiple children and wanted a fairer system.To use a case study: Marie Buchan, a single mother who had 8 children who ranged in age of 12 years to 6 months at the time of her infamy.Marie was dubbed the ‘Welfare Queen’ in the British media as she received £26,000 a year while being unemployed. Now take into account that this was at the time the average wage per year of full-time employment in the UK before tax. It is understandable that people would take issue that they have to work for their wage while there is someone who is getting the same amount of money due to choosing to have a large number of children.Furthermore, this same lady who complained about getting capped at £26,000 has also publicly admitted on national television that living on benefits was ‘very easy’.‘You obviously have a baby, you send off the application form, birth certificate, they assess it and then you’ve got your money in your account. It is very easy.’Now, this is not the reality for all large families. There is another large family in Britain known as the Radford family. They only claim child tax credits (that every parent of a child in the UK is entitled to regardless of wage). The family have 21 children who range from 30 to a few months old. They, however, work hard to budget and provide for their children. The father Noel owns his own business and is able to provide for each of his children. They do not get judged as they are not expecting the state to provide for any of their children.The key distinction here is financial responsibility for your children. I am a big believer that although every person has rights, those rights also come with responsibility. People have the right to have children, however, they should be financially responsible for those children and able to provide for them. The government can sometimes assist with this, but should not have to assist in the cases where people choose to have as many kids as possible in order to maximise the amount of ‘free money’.Remember that money is never free and has to come from somewhere. The money that was initially allocated for people who made the choice to have lots of children even though they knew they were not financially able to do so, could have been better allocated to other resources. Essentially it is tax payer’s money that is being spent in order to fund someone else's lifestyle choice.If you are a lower income family who can afford to have more children and still be able to effectively care for them without the financial assistance of the state then have all the children you like. Having more children because ‘you want to’ and expecting the state and by extension taxpayers to pick up the bill is wrong.-Day 20/365