“John Swinney's Budget Bill will provide £20 million to fund
Shelter Scotland’s proposal to help those struggling most with the cost of the
tax. This funding will enable local authorities to increase discretionary
housing payments to meet some of the implications of the Bedroom Tax." Humza Yousaf.
Bravo, John. It's a start till we can be rid for good of a government which thinks that this is fair and decent, whilst doing nothing to provide more suitable housing for people who need it, and indeed which continues to sell off the public housing stock.
The Bedroom tax is vicious. Not least since it is designed to 'save money' only if people can't move home and are forced into paying the extra £25 per spare room.
ReplyDeleteIt is an evil levy on the weakest.
I could understand the bedroom tax, Den, if people had options.
DeleteThe likes of the people who put this into operation can say... Oh, my house is now costing an extra 25% of my income, so I shall move to another one... and do just that.
Most of the people this affects have no option to move.
There are no smaller apartments, despite the trend for more and more people to live alone. Nobody foresaw the need for smaller houses.
Just like nobody foresaw the increase in pension age people following the baby boom 65 years ago...
These people only foresee their next expenses cheque and the next election.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Its designed to raise revenue or 'savings' in Govt speak... because they provide no alternative option.
DeletePay up or be homeless.
Its blackmailing the weakest.
The thing is it will cost money in teh end... But there are people to like to hear that the poor are being trampled on. They are playing to that audience, which they reckon in large enough to give them an advantage.
DeleteSays a lot about the country when this sort of thing is designed to catch votes.
Seems to me that under the LabConDem rules people are only permitted to stay in council or private rented multi roomed accommodation so long as they have children actually living under the same roof as them. The minute the children leave home for whatever reason be it college, university, fight in illegal wars etc then the good old killer tax a.k.a. the bedroom tax comes a knocking at the door.
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to know from all those millionaires in Westminster is what are the tenants supposed to do once their kids have grown up and left home and return home to visit their parents?
Where are the children of the tenants supposed to sleep?
Is Westminster really telly everyone that their parents MUST move to a small one bed flat and they, the kids, MUST sleep in B & B's or hotels?
Has Westminster any idea about the earnings of most folk who were born and raised in council housing?
Does anyone of the multitude of the LabConDem millionaires not realise that to spend a night in a B & B or hotel costs MONEY?
It's all right for Westminster millionaires to think like this but then again THEY can claim these expenses all back from the tax payer can't they?
From the New Statesman.
ReplyDeleteShapps is clearly unaware or uncaring of the problems he causes and does the typical "some woman from Brazil" act you expect from the superior Brit male.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/09/grant-shapps-dismisses-un-housing-expert-woman-brazil
After the United Nations' special investigator on housing, Raquel Rolnik, visited the UK and warned that the bedroom tax was having a "shocking" effect on the vulnerable and should be abolished, one might hope that the government would engage with her concerns.
Rolnik, a former urban planning minister in Brazil, said of the measure, which reduces housing benefit by 14% for those deemed to have one "spare room" and by 25% for those with two or more, "I was very shocked to hear how people really feel abused in their human rights by this decision and why – being so vulnerable – they should pay for the cost of the economic downturn, which was brought about by the financial crisis. People in testimonies were crying, saying 'I have nowhere to go', 'I will commit suicide'."
She added on the Today programme this morning that "there was a danger of retrogression in the right to affordable housing in the UK.
But rather than addressing these points, Grant Shapps, the Conservative chairman, chose to launch a crude rant against Rolnik. The former housing minister told Today that her comments were "an absolute disgrace" and questioned why "a woman from Brazil" - "a country that has 50 million people in inadequate housing" - was lecturing British ministers. The answer, of course, is that she is representing the UN, not the Brazilian government, and that the coalition has imposed a policy that is causing untold harm to the poorest and most vulnerable families. Shapps added that he was writing to the UN Secretary General to "ask for an apology and an investigation into how this came about".
On Today, Rolnik rightly singled out the effect the policy is having on the disabled. For many of these families, this additional space is not a luxury but a necessity. A disabled person who suffers from disrupted sleep may be unable to share a room with their partner, likewise a disabled child with their brothers and sisters. The same applies to those recovering from an illness or an operation. After months of pressure from campaigners, the government announced that families with severely disabled children would be exempt but the majority of the 670,000 tenants due to be affected will still lose out, including hundreds of thousands of disabled families.
Sorry for going O/T Tris but have you seen this?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-24067411
Never mind the TRUTH is always hanging around just to make sure things do not get too far out of hand though.
https://twitter.com/ScottishPol/status/378174840395411457/photo/1/large
Oh in case you're wondering, this is obvious a ridiculously pathetic attempt by Lamont to try and avert attention from the Labour introduced killer tax a.k.a. the bedroom tax!
Labour have NO policies,
they have NO ideas,
they have no honour,
they have no respect,
they are bereft of any concept of knowledgeable debate!
In fact Labour in Scotland are a complete waste of space, an insult to normal human intelligence and at FMQ's their attempt at attacking the First Minister each week are not even worthy of comment!
On the face of it, it looks like there is something to be investigated...then you look at it and find that there is nothing in it at all. It was sold for GARL; GARL was abandoned and the land was auctioned.
DeleteWhat would Lamont have done? Said, we will auction the land but the person who owned it before is disallowed from bidding?
Tris
ReplyDeleteThe single room subsidy is bad on many levels and I agree in the longer term will not save money in some geographical areas such as London. It may save money in areas of Scotland, the north of England and Wales where single bedroom accommodation is at a premium but longer term I don't think this is about saving money. I noted before I don't think this is the only agenda here. I really suspect that there is a drive to move people into the private sector in the longer term thus removing council and social rented housing association provision and returning working people to the whim of the private sector where the money is profit and not reinvestment in social housing. A move back to the vistorian age etc. I would not be surprised if we see changes, probably in England, making it very easy to evict people or the removal of reasons to evict full stop. This is an ideological move on the part of a right wing government, who have also conned the public, but even more sadly the opposition into accepting a neo-con agenda. This is a major shift to the right that Labour will not reverse or offer to end for fear of upsetting the elderly and the middle England vote who love the policy. This is about attacking the poor while blaming the poor for being poor.
It is a sad indictment of the UK and the sooner we are gone the better.
Bruce
It's a law that should not apply here, Bruce. We are building more council houses, so that people who can't afford to buy don;t have to go to the private sector, where in so many cases they are stung.
DeleteThis is all about ethnic cleansing of London and nothing more and is more odious than what happened in Europe in WW2 by the Fascists the sooner England wakes up that LibLabCons are one and the same the better.
ReplyDeleteWhistleblower comes out!
I agree about the fascists. There seem so many similarities with the 1930s.
DeleteWhat on earth was that stuff about Bateman... Spoof?
tris
ReplyDeleteTo be honest Can and his pals to have a valid point,
when you are filthy rich and live in a nice area do you really
want to have any of the great unwashed sharing you private living space ??
No of course not its just to awful so a tad of social cleansing which
clears the hoi polloi back to sewers from whence they came.
Is to be applauded, apart from the lefty bleeding heart liberal minded
but they have lost anyway.
Bedroom tax a vote winner in the W1 post code area
and that's the area which counts .
That's it in a nutshell. They want the scruff out of London, now it's the rich non taxed capital of the world. I mean you really don;t want to park up your £10m cruiser next to some oink with last year's fashion and not a drop of decent vintage in the cellar...
DeleteSo send them oop north or to the seaside resorts that the working classes used to go to before they found Turkey.
And then they can pave the streets in gold... Turn again Johnson. Mayor of London...