Labour's empty rhetoric on the Bedroom Tax and record of failure

There has been much hot air and vacant rhetoric this week about a debate in Parliament. The Labour Party would have you believe that the debate and vote on Wednesday would have brought about the abolition of the so-called “Bedroom Tax”. Sadly, either they are ignorant of what an Opposition Day Motion (for that is what the debate was on) can achieve or they are trying to mislead people. Even if passed, the Motion would not have changed anything and would not have put an end to the Bedroom tax.

The Labour Party could have used the time in Parliament given to the opposition in a way that really would have scraped the Bedroom Tax Lib Dem MP Andrew George’s Private Members Bill to do just that (held up by the Tories refusing to allow more time to debate it). Instead they chose to hold an empty debate and behave like a school debating team.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Labour party prefer empty words to taking positive action on the Bedroom Tax as they have form on this because the real cause of the problem is not the Bedroom Tax itself but that successive governments, both Tory & Labour, for decades have failed to build enough social homes.

We now have a limited stock of social homes where families with children are forced to make do in homes too small for their needs while others, mostly older people with children who have moved out, are in home that are bigger than they need. There are too few social homes

The theory behind what became call the Bedroom Tax was to encourage those in social housing who are subsidised by the state through Housing Benefit that have spare rooms they don’t need, to move to smaller homes to allow those who can make better use of those spare rooms move into the vacated homes. The key word there should be encourage. Where there is a demonstrable need for that spare room, for absent children, special medical needs, etc, or (just as importantly) where there is no suitable smaller homes available to move to then there should be no charge made.

Sadly the Tories, in spite of promises not to, have made the Bedroom Tax punitive. What is worse is there are documented cases where Labour Councils have not used the extra money that has provided by the Government to alleviate cases of real hardship to make political capital on the back of those in need.

The current Bedroom Tax scheme should be scrapped but Labour have been shown to be incapable of dealing the real problem of dealing with the lack of social housing. In 13 years under Labour 2780 Council Houses were started, in the four years of having the Lib Dems in the Coalition there have been 6920[i]. This is by no means enough but turning it round is a start, let’s hope that if Labour somehow get back in next year they won’t cut it back again.

I have had enough of the crocodile tears from Labour on this and many other issues. Rather than playing school debating society games, they should own up to their mistakes from the past (including introducing the Bedroom Tax for private tenants) before trying to lecture others.

[i] Numbers taken from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/376665/LiveTable208.ods