The bedroom tax supreme court rulings: what happened and what does it mean?
We all know about the corrosive impact of this tax on poor and vulnerable people in rural housing markets characterised by limited supply and high rents. So you will no doubt find this a very interesting story! It tells us:
The court ruled on seven cases, each of which had challenged housing benefit regulations underpinning the bedroom tax on the basis that they discriminated against the claimants’ right to family life. The claimants also contended that the regulations were in breach of public sector equality laws.
Six of the claimants (Rourke, Drage, JD, Daly, Carmichael and the Rutherford family) either had a disability themselves or lived with family members who had a disability. They claimed they needed an “extra” bedroom to enable them to cope with the health and medical consequences of the disability, and that the bedroom tax therefore unfairly discriminated against them. The seventh claimant was a single parent (“A”) who as a consequence of being assaulted and raped had had a bedroom in her home specially converted into a secure “safe room”. She claimed that the bedroom tax – which financially penalised the safe room – discriminated against women like her who live in “sanctuary scheme” homes
The judges agreed that there were unreasonable differences in the way housing benefit regulations treated adults and children. It was unfair that Jacqueline Carmichael, whose medical condition required her to sleep in a different bed to her husband, was hit by the bedroom tax while households where children needed separate rooms for reasons of disability were not. Likewise, while adults who needed an extra room for an overnight carer were exempt from the bedroom tax, children – such as Paul and Susan Rutherford’s grandson Warren, who has a rare genetic disorder and is unable to walk, talk or feed himself – were not. These anomalies, the judges ruled, were “manifestly without reason”.
As a result of their victory, the Carmichael and the Rutherford households are now exempt from the bedroom tax. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) says it will “take steps to ensure we comply with the judgment in due course”. This means housing benefit regulations will be changed to ensure households in similar positions are also exempted. It is not known precisely how many households will be exempt, but estimates put it in the low thousands. Households who do not get exemption will have to continue apply for discretionary help to pay their rent. These locally administered funds will be increasingly stretched as a result of the extended benefit cap