September 2014

The battle over the

bedroom tax Politics, rationality and discourse

Alex Marsh

School for Policy Studies

University of Bristol

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A paper to the 2014 ENHR Conference

Beyond Globalisation: Remaking housing policy in a complex world

Edinburgh, July

Very preliminary draft:

Not for citation without the authors permission

The battle over the bedroom tax: politics, rationality and discourse

Alex Marsh

School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, 8 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TZ, United

Kingdom

e-mail: alex.marsh@bristol.ac.uk

Abstract

One of the most contentious components of the current UK Coalition governments welfare reform agenda is the

under-occupancy regulations associated with housing benefit. These regulations apply to households below

retirement age living in the social rented sector who are deemed to be living in accommodation larger than that

justified by their needs.

The regulations have been contentious in their consequences for both households and landlords. They have been

equally contentious with respect to the public discourse accompanying the policy change. But this policy change

offers the opportunity to examine a number of facets of contemporary policy making beyond the strategic use of

language. These include the way evidence informs, or otherwise, the policy process, and the tensions inherent

within Coalition government and between Westminster and the devolved administrations.

This paper examines the evolution of policy on under-occupancy from the arrival of the Coalition government in

May 2010 until, broadly, the end of March 2014, twelve months after the new regulations were implemented.

Keywords: Housing benefit; bedroom tax; policy discourse; evidence; institutions

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The battle over the bedroom tax: politics, rationality and discourse

1. Introduction

The current UK Government a coalition between the dominant right-wing Conservative

party and the centrist Liberal Democrats as the minority partner - is in the process of

implementing a far-reaching programme of welfare reform, given legislative force by the

Welfare Reform Act 2012 and associated secondary legislation. This programme sits

alongside a range of reforms originating in the housing policy arena and embodied in the

Localism Act 2011. A number of reviews of this overall agenda are now available (see, for

example, Stephens and Whitehead, 2014).

The welfare reform programme has a number of strands. Changes to the indexation

mechanisms for benefits and the imposition of an overall cap on the maximum benefits a

household can receive are already in place. The landmark change is an ambitious attempt to

transform the core of the system. This is still at the pilot stage. It is proposed that the six main

welfare benefits, including housing benefit, are replaced by a single Universal Credit. The

Secretary of State who holds this policy brief Iain Duncan Smith is confident that

Universal Credit will be extended nationwide over the next few years. However, the

Universal Credit project has been plagued by problems, focused around the ICT, and it is

considered by the Governments own Major Projects Authority to be the riskiest government

project currently being undertaken. There is, however, some debate about whether the MPA

has been lent on by the Secretary of State to minimise the concerns it expresses publicly. Few

people outside Government have much confidence that Universal Credit will be implemented

to the current timetable, or implemented at all.

One of the most contentious components of the welfare reform agenda is the changes to the

housing benefit regulations applied to households in social rented housing. These regulations

are applied to households below retirement age who are deemed to be living in

accommodation larger than that justified by their needs. The rules apply a percentage

reduction to the amount of assistance households will receive from housing benefit if they are

deemed to be under-occupying their property. Housing benefit is reduced by 14% if they are

deemed to have one spare bedroom and 25% if they have two or more spare bedrooms. Initial

estimates suggested that, on average, affected tenants would lose between 14 and 25 per

week. The regulations came into force in April 2013 and we are now beginning to understand

their effects on the ground.

In terms of substantive issues of housing policy and finance, the regulations have been

contentious at just about every stage since their announcement. They are contentious in terms

of the profile of households that are affected; their differential spatial particularly cross-

regional - impact; and their impacts upon the finances and development plans of the social

housing landlords affected. The regulations have been equally contentious with respect to the

public discourse surrounding the policy change. The opposition Labour partys strategy of

labelling the policy a bedroom tax has gained considerable traction. While it is

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descriptively inaccurate, it has proved effective in shaping the debate. The Governments

countermove of declaring the policy to be the removal of a spare room subsidy, while

rhetorically acute, has proven less effective. Such open contestation over the terms of the

debate is unusual. It can provide an illuminating case study of strategic uses of discourse in

the political process.

The evolution of the housing benefit regulations offers an opportunity to examine a number

of facets of contemporary policy making beyond the strategic use of language. These include

the way in which evidence informs, or otherwise, the policy process; the tensions inherent

within Coalition government and between Westminster and the devolved administrations; the

role of Freedom of Information provisions both as a research tool and a political tool; and the

way in which debates over technical issues associated with housing assistance can become

implicated in broader strategies political strategies such as attempts by right wing politicians

to silence public service broadcasters.

This paper examines the way in which housing benefit policy has evolved from the arrival of

the Coalition government in May 2010 until, broadly, the end of March 2014, twelve months

after the under-occupation regulations were implemented. It starts by providing an overview

of the literature on the policy process and policy change. It highlights ideas, institutions and

interests as core to a simple model for thinking about policy change. It then considers four

key dimensions of the evolving story of the bedroom tax: terminology, evidence, politics and

institutions. As will become apparent, while separated for analytical convenience, these

dimensions of the story are fundamentally inter-related.

2. The drivers of policy change

Theories of the policy process and policy change can be classified in a number of different

ways. John (2012) proposes a classification based on five broad explanatory approaches:

theory will tend to draw concepts, variables and causal explanations from approaches that

focus on institutions; groups and networks; exogenous factors; rational actors; or ideas. Each

of these families of theory encompasses more subtly differentiated approaches. This is

perhaps clearest in institutionalism where several variants have been identified (following

Hall and Taylor, 1996; Schmidt, 2008; 2012). Each explanatory approach adopts a different

position in relation to core questions, such as the appropriate balance between structure and

agency in social scientific explanation.

Giving theoretical primacy to one of Johns five approaches would deliver pure

explanations for policy making and policy change. More common in policy studies are

synthetic explanations. The three explanatory frameworks that dominated the theorisation of

the policy process during the 1990s (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Baumgartner and

Jones, 1993; Kingdon, 1995) were all, to varying degrees, synthetic approaches. Attempts to

provide synthetic explanations have subsequently become more elaborate as they seek to

encompass an ever greater array of variables drawn from more of Johns five approaches, and

beyond (John, 2003; Real-Dato, 2009). The challenges of effecting theoretical synthesis in a

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way that delivers coherence should not be underestimated (Cairney, 2013). Importantly, when

we seek to think about the role that evidence can and does play in shaping policy our

conception of the policy process can significantly shape our understanding (eg Burton, 2006).

At the core of much methodological discussion in policy studies is the plausibility of

methodological monism. In practice, positivist thinking had a strong grip on policy studies

for many years, as it did on political science and public administration. This resulted in a

premium being placed upon hypothesis testing, quantitative methods and, ideally, the

statistical estimation of models. However, counter-currents of postpositivism have not only

developed but arguably continue to strengthen (Fischer, 2003; Fischer and Gottweis, 2012;

Bevir and Rhodes, 2003). Moves towards policy anthropology (Shore et al, 2011) and policy

ethnography (Rhodes, 2011) take a very different stance on ontological questions such as the

nature of social structures or the explanation of continuity and change. They favour detailed

qualitative research which seeks to unlock meaning. Micro-level analysis of subjectivity,

ambiguity, and interpretation provides insights into how policy actors construct and

reconstruct their world and act within it and upon it. Here again we encounter arguments in

favour of theoretical synthesis. For example, McKee (2009) has argued for the synthesis of

governmentality theory with ethnographic approaches, while the introduction of agency and

ambiguity into institutionalist approaches has been advocated by Mahoney and Thelen (2010)

among others.

The analysis of policy implementation rose to prominence during the 1970s. The period to

the mid-1980s witnessed a proliferation of models of implementation (Hill and Hupe, 2009).

However, interest in the topic then waned somewhat. In the late 1990s the discussion was

rekindled in more nuanced form (Hill, 1997), seeking to integrate implementation with

broader policy process theories and sensitivity to institutional structures (Exworthy and

Powell, 2004). Academic debates over implementation have, more recently, been advanced

through the exploration of the conditions for policy success (McConnell, 2010),

The role of ideas in shaping policy has been a significant feature of the literature since Halls

(1993) seminal contribution proposing policy paradigms and a model of three levels of policy

change. There has been a substantial resurgence of interest in the analytical value of ideas in

explaining policy change. Indeed, it is typical to talk of the ideational turn in policy analysis

(Berman, 2013). Here again some of the most interesting work looks to combine the role of

ideas with a recognition of institutional structures and material interest (eg Cairney, 2009).

The policy studies literature intersects with the literature on housing policy only infrequently.

In this paper I want to draw lightly on a few key ideas. I will simplify the modelling of the

policy process and policy change to the statement that policy change and successful policy

implementation are shaped by a combination of ideas, interests and institutions. It can be

driven by the power and persuasiveness of a specific policy idea or the convergence of

differing policy perspectives on the desirability of a specific course of action. Ideas may have

independent influence over the development of policy, but they are more likely to be put to

work in the service of particular interests. There is room for agency, but within institutional

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constraints. Those constraints are both objective and subjective. The scope for agency, and

the balance of the objective and subjective constraints under which it can be exercised differs

by social location.

3. Terminology matters

If we trace out the trajectory of the debate over the change in the housing benefit regulations

increasing politicization quickly becomes apparent. When the proposals were originally

brought forward the rules relating to deductions for under-occupation were referred to

relatively neutrally as the social sector size criteria. This was the terminology that was

employed by the Department of Work and Pensions in its public pronouncements about the

proposals as they made their way through Parliament. In Parliament the term under-

occupancy penalty was also used during debate over the Bill. The impact assessments

associated with the Welfare Reform Bill referred to under-occupation of social housing

(DWP, 2012a). The regulations were given legislative force by a statutory instrument

published in December 2012 (DWP, 2012b), and this document avoids giving the regulations

any general label.

The Government justified the change to the underoccupation regulations on a variety of

grounds. As part of its broader austerity agenda there was an overarching imperative to save

money from the welfare bill, the biggest single area of government revenue spending. There

were then two different types of fairness argument advanced. Firstly, the need for social

housing outstrips the available supply and therefore giving under-occupying households an

incentive to trade down to a smaller property would free up larger properties for larger

families and those stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation. Alternatively, if a

household wished to stay in situ, the changes in the regulations would increase their incentive

to secure additional income to make up the shortfall in housing benefit. Secondly, it is unfair

to expect taxpayers to subsidize social rented tenants to live in properties beyond those

strictly required to meet their current needs and more comodious than those in which the

taxpayers themselves live. This second argument was, however, deployed more forcefully in

relation to the overall cap on benefit. While the argument about encouraging better stock

utilization is a long-standing feature of the UK housing policy debate, the second argument

represents a novel interpretation of fairness in the debate over UK housing support. Indeed,

the overall Coalition welfare reform agenda has been as much about reimagining citizenship

rights as it has been about detailed policy redesign. Finally, it was argued that the regulation

changes were merely harmonising the treatment of households in the social rented with the

less generous regulations for housing benefit already in place in the private rented sector,

regulations introduced by the previous Labour government.

While the under-occupancy regulation changes may have been presented in relatively neutral

terms at the outset that does not mean they were politically uncontentious. Equally

importantly, the debate over the changes became increasingly politicised as implementation

in April 2013 approached.

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The suffix tax holds a particular resonance in UK policy debates. There is a strong

presumption in much public discourse over policy that taxes are, at best, a necessary evil,

and, at worst, a way of extracting money from households for the government to then waste

or redistribute to the undeserving. The positive case for robust mechanisms of social

insurance or well-funded public services as of benefit to society as a whole rarely gets a

hearing. Survey respondents quite regularly indicate they would like to see good quality

public services and consider them important, but it seems rather fewer would volunteer to pay

more tax to ensure the services are well-funded.

So portraying something as an iniquitous tax is a fairly familiar tactic in British political

debate, because we know that it can work to undermine a policy. This is most graphically

illustrated by the case of the ill-fated community charge reforms of local taxation, which

contributed to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher in the early 1990s. The opposition of the

day succeeded in styling the community charge as a regressive poll tax, which self-

consciously resonated with the Peasants Revolt of 1381 a popular uprising which had a

number of causes but which was triggered by attempts to collect a poll tax introduced by

King Edward III. And the poll tax protests again contributed to major shift in policy in the

early 1990s towards the system of council tax we have today.

The current Labour opposition made use of the tax tactic when it responded to the

Chancellors 2012 budget by ridiculing proposals for a pasty tax and a caravan tax. It

was therefore, perhaps, not a surprise when they tried a similar strategy in relation to the

housing benefit regulation changes which they styled a bedroom tax. The term did not

originate with Labour, but they were quick to latch on to its potential at the beginning of

2012.

Given the way in which the tax suffix would be reflexively recognised as signalling an

underlying judgement of the unfairness of the policy change this was perhaps an astute move.

But, on reflection, it was also a relatively risky strategy because, strictly speaking, the

housing benefit regulation changes are in no real sense a tax. Rather, they are a reduction in

the generosity of the subsidy available. The only way you could rationalise the change as a

tax is if you start from the premise that the original level of subsidy, and the quality and size

of accommodation it allows a household to access, is theirs by right. Then you could argue

the regulation change represents the government depriving them of something that is

rightfully theirs hence a tax. But the Labour party has not felt a particular need to develop

some form of underpinning logic to the application of the label. It is sufficient that it is

evocative.

The Labour opposition were also able to deploy arguments of more substance to criticise the

implementation and likely incidence of the regulation changes. For example, the

Governments analogy with the treatment of private rented sector tenants is weakened by the

fact that the changes in the private rented sector were applied to new tenancies only, whereas

the bedroom tax would be applied to existing tenants. If the rationale for the policy is as a

means of encouraging existing tenants to trade down then that demands that this be the case.

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But this sort of retrospective change to the rules of the game is always open to the charge of

being unfair. The policy is likely to lead to the relocation of some of the most long-standing

members of low income communities: so there are also arguments about the impact of the

policy upon community stability and the quality of life of existing tenants.

Equally importantly, social housing landlords and their representatives were warning almost

from the outset that the sector does not contain enough smaller properties for under-

occupying households to trade down to. There were consequently likely to be two outcomes

in the short term. Existing tenants were going to have to make up the shortfall in housing

benefit from their own pocket: unless they are able to find substantial amounts of additional

work, this is going to reduce the post-housing cost income of households who are already, by

definition, on low incomes. Or existing tenants are going to fall into rent arrears and, as a

consequence, landlords cash flow will become more fragile, which will have knock-on

consequences for the rest of their business, including their financial capacity to build new

properties. Again, there is perceived to be an unfairness here the regulation change will

make poor households poorer while offering them limited scope to address the problem it has

created. The policy was further problematic because statistics produced during the process of

policy development showed that the majority of households affected would contain a member

with a disability. So it was a policy targeted at the most vulnerable.

Several of these more substantial arguments were deployed in Parliament when the House of

Lords sought to secure exemptions from the under-occupancy provisions of the Welfare

Reform Bill for a range of households. However, these arguments were not sufficient to force

the Government to change course. And they are more technical arguments that struggle to

capture the public imagination.

Despite not being descriptively accurate, it was the move to apply the bedroom tax label

that gained political traction and meant that the issue has stayed on the political agenda in a

way that many of the other, more far-reaching, components of the welfare reform agenda

have not. One reason for this is that bedroom tax is a much more effective and memorable

label for the regulation changes than the official nomenclature. Jeffares (2014) has recently

explored the influence that this type of two word encapsulation of a policy idea can have in

public policy discourse. Initially non-Labour commentators referred to the policy as the so-

called bedroom tax but the so-called gradually started to fall away as the terminology

became widespread.

Given that the Labour party was gaining significant traction with its framing of the policy

change as a bedroom tax, it is not surprising that the Government sought to respond with their

own newsworthy framing of the issue. It is more surprising that this response did not appear

until early 2013. The term the Government favoured was the removal of the spare room

subsidy.

This phrase clearly attempts to counter the idea that the policy is a tax on something to which

households have a right and substitute the idea that the Government is removing an

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unwarranted benefit being received by the households a government shouldnt be wasting

money by subsidizing spare rooms. The implicit claim that the change to the regulation is

justified indeed, overdue is transparent.

The origins of the term spare room subsidy are a little cloudy, and here we become

entangled in the differences between government statements and party political statements.

The first recorded use of the term was by Grant Shapps, the Chairman of the Conservative

Party, on 17th

February 2013. It was not until late February that it was used by a Government

minister and not until 28th

March, just five days before the policy came into force, that it was

used in a Government document. A Freedom of Information request to the DWP led to the

statement that Mr Shapps was using the term in a party political capacity. The term only

became integrated into government lexicon the following month (Lewis, 2014). The political

origins of this term are therefore clearly evident. This is perhaps not surprising because the

DWP under Iain Duncan Smith is, arguably, the most highly politicised department of state.

The absorption of the term into the DWPs official framing of the policy issue has led to

questions about whether this breaches civil service codes which require neutrality.

This contestation over terminology for a relatively technical change to housing subsidy

regulations can also be viewed from the perspective of broader political strategies. For

example, it allowed the Conservative party to open up another front in its long-running battle

with the BBC over the latters perceived left-wing bias. The term bedroom tax quickly

achieved widespread usage, in part because, as noted above, it is more digestible than the

competing terminology available. It sits easily in a headline. That meant that reports by BBC

news, and on other TV channels, in early 2013 tended to refer to the policy as the so-called

bedroom tax. This triggered a letter to the BBC from Iain Duncan Smith complaining that

the BBC was adopting the language of the Labour party (Salsbury, 2013).

The Governments attempt to reframe the debate, however, has so far proven largely

unsuccessful. While Ministers have continued to use the term spare room subsidy, few

apart from committed Conservative supporters, and some centre-right Liberal Democrats,

have done likewise. The success of the Opposition in conducting the debate on its terms is

well-illustrated by the fact that bedroom tax made the shortlist for the Oxford English

Dictionaries word of the year for 2013 (Guardian, 2013b).

4. Evidence matters?

The UK has fully embraced the better regulation agenda. Indeed, the current Coalition

government has developed some sophisticated institutional structures for metaregulation. All

proposals for primary legislation must be accompanied by one or more impact assessment

(IA). The timing of the public release of these IAs can be a source of political contention

they can appear too late to usefully inform the relevant legislative debate. The IAs to support

welfare report fell into that category.

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It is uncontroversial to say that ex ante assessment of the impacts of policy change is

difficult. That is especially the case when the anticipated impacts rely upon behavioural

effects that are unknown and unknowable in advance. So when the DWP modelled the

savings from the implementation of the bedroom tax it was always going to represent a broad

estimate. The DWP quite rightly conducted sensitivity analysis to see how robust its

conclusions were to different assumptions on key variables. The revised IA, published in

June 2012, stated that the Department expected the policy to deliver savings of close to a

billion pounds over the two financial years 2013/14-2014/15.

However, once the policy is in place real data will begin to emerge and ex ante assessments

can be recalibrated. Tunstall (2013) was the first to attempt to do this. The starting point for

Tunstalls report was a Freedom of Information request, submitted to gain access to the

DWPs model for estimating the impact of the regulation changes. The DWP responded with

the skeleton of the model and its outputs rather than the inner workings, so the researchers

had to reverse engineer the model to work out how the financial impacts of the regulation

changes had been calculated. The report then considers the assumptions used by DWP and

notes that some are prima facie, and even without bringing new data into the picture, rather

odd. The proportion of housing benefit-dependent households in the social rented sector used

in some of the modelling scenarios was well out of line with anything likely to be observed in

reality. But perhaps the most significant and questionable assumption is that the policy

change would deliver the projected savings of 480m in 2013/14 only if it is assumed that no

tenants moved as a result of cuts to their housing benefit. Whatever the proportion of tenants

who move as a result of the policy turns out to be, it certainly wont be zero. A key point is

that all the slightly questionable assumptions used by DWP are biased in the same direction.

They all led to higher estimates of projected savings.

The same picture emerges when real data is substituted for assumptions in the DWP model.

Tunstalls research draws on data from a total of 127,494 homes in England, which represents

2.6% of the UK social housing stock. It turns out that, in the first four or five months of

policy implementation, tenants are not behaving in the ways the model assumed. And the

differences are all such as to reduce the likely savings from the reduction in housing benefit.

Tunstall suggests that, simply by making this adjustment to the model, a quarter to a third of

the projected savings disappear. Finally, Tunstall lists a range of other costs and

consequences that the DWP does not include in its IA but which a holistic assessment of the

policy should take into account. The Conservative Ministers forthright response to this

report was to dismiss it out of hand, primarily on the basis of the questionable argument that

the reworking of the model was based on too small a sample of real data.

The role of evidence in shaping the development of the bedroom tax is worth considering

further. While the Bill was still being debated in Parliament research evidence from the

Cambridge Centre for Housing and Property Research (CCHPR, 2012), for example,

indicated clearly that the majority of households that would be affected by the bedroom tax

contained a disabled member. So the Government was arguably fully aware that the policy

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would hit the most vulnerable. But it had to press on with the policy encompassing all under-

occupiers, otherwise it would not deliver the financial savings it was seeking.

This also points to another discursive tactic the Government has successfully exploited in its

rationalisation of the policy. That is, there is significant ambiguity over the idea of a spare

room.

The term spare room carries with it overtones of luxury, of over-accommodation, of rooms

that are unnecessary and which could be put to better use by others. The overarching message

associated with the policy is plausible and seductive: the government shouldnt waste money

subsidizing people to live in accommodation that is more generous than is necessary to meet

their needs. But it has been very important for the success of this tactic that the data are not

interrogated too closely. Because it soon becomes clear that these rooms are not spare in

this sense. For example, they are used to store medical equipment. Or the regulations assume

that couples share a bedroom or children under 10 can appropriately share a bedroom, but

many types of disability mean that this is not possible or not desirable.

Such cases have featured regularly in the news media. For every case where the audience is

sympathetic to the plight of a household already suffering health misfortune, and for every

case where the audience considers the removal of housing benefit due to under-occupancy

to be an unfairness of a different kind, support for the Governments policy ebbs away.

The Government has put in place transitional relief in the form of Discretionary Housing

Payments which are administered by local authorities. The aim is to allow local authorities to

continue to support the most vulnerable households to remain in their current homes, even

though they no longer receive adequate support from housing benefit. However, the DHP

fund is a fraction of the size of the housing benefit removed by the under-occupancy

regulations. And, being transitional, the intention was that this assistance was available in the

short to medium term to allow households to make adjustments to their housing consumption

over less urgent timescales. Under pressure, and in the face of emerging evidence of

hardships created by the bedroom tax in practice, the Government has increased the size of

the DHP fund somewhat. But it is still intended to be temporary.

Since the under-occupancy regulations have been implemented several studies have been

conducted to assess emerging impacts. Some focus upon the under-occupancy rules

specifically, while others seek to assess the cumulative impacts of the various welfare reform

measures. These studies have usefully been reviewed by Wendy Wilson at the House of

Commons Library (Wilson, 2014; see also Work and Pensions Select Committee, 2014). The

picture emerging is not straightforward, but on many points it accords with the predictions of

the critics of the policy. Fewer people than anticipated have been affected by the bedroom

tax. We might plausibly argue that is likely to be the result of the improving economy. It

means the savings from the bedroom tax will be less than expected. While quite a lot of

existing tenants have expressed an interest in moving to a smaller property, and there has

been an increase in mutual exchange activities, relatively few tenants have been able to move.

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There have been significant increases in tenant arrears in many areas, there has been a modest

increase in evictions, the cuts to housing benefit have reduced already low incomes and it is

often those who are affected by the bedroom tax who are affected by other cuts happening

under welfare reform. Many landlords are rethinking allocations policies.

The bedroom tax bites harder in England the further away from London you travel. And it is

estimated that it hits hardest of all in the devolved administration in Wales. In London the

housing stock is under considerable pressure and utilization rates are already high. In other

areas, such as the North East of England, housing pressure is lower and an under-occupying

household is not necessarily standing in the way of another household seeking to move out of

unsuitable temporary accommodation. Some landlords are continuing to let family properties

to under-occupying households, but to households who are not reliant on housing benefit to

pay the rent. A few landlords have considered demolition of stock because it is uneconomic

for under-occupying households to rent the properties and there are not the families to fill the

properties instead.

5. Politics matter

As previously noted, the UKs current government is a Coalition. This is the first coalition

government in two generations. Often used in this context, but used out of context, is

Benjamin Disraelis comment England does not love coalitions, made in 1852.

The formation of the coalition in May 2010 has set up an unusual political dynamic, which

has affected the passage of the various legislative measures that affect social housing most

directly. Both the Localism Act and the Welfare Reform Act were pushed through Parliament

with a sense of urgency in the first half of the Parliamentary term. They were introduced to

the legislative process during a period where Labour was not in a position to offer any

effective opposition and the Liberal Democrats, who would normally have provided

supplementary opposition, were committed to coalition government in the national interest.

During this period the Liberal Democrats adopted a strategy of presenting a unified public

government position on legislative measures. The Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party lent

their support to these measures as part of the coalition government, giving no indication that

this was done under sufferance as a price of coalition compromise. This was despite the

Liberal Democrats own internal policy making process passing a number of motions that

meant its agreed party policy was to oppose key aspects of welfare reform. Discontent among

the Liberal Democrat activist membership grew as the initial negative impacts of the

bedroom tax started to appear. This led to a motion being passed at their Autumn conference

in September 2013 strongly critical of the bedroom tax and calling for further action to

mitigate the hardships created. The motion stopped short of calling for the abolition. But this

Federal Conference was hardly leading the way: the Scottish Liberal Democrat Conference

had already voted in favour of abolition of the bedroom tax. The partys position was, and

remains, incoherent both supporting and opposing the same measure.

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Shortly after the Liberal Democrat conference in 2013 and in the run up to the Labour party

conference the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, committed his party to abolishing the bedroom

tax if Labour were to form the next government. It was clear from opinion poll evidence that

the bedroom tax was unpopular with a majority of the public, and the vast majority of

Labour-leaning voters. It was also unpopular with the majority of Liberal Democrat voters

(Guardian, 2013a).

The Labour Party has subsequently used the bedroom tax tactically to further increase the

Liberal Democrats discomfort. In particular, they used an Opposition Day motion in

November 2013 to move a motion to abolish the bedroom tax. Given that by this stage

Labour were aware of members of the Liberal Democrats who were unhappy about the

policy, there was the possibility of the Government being defeated. In the end the

Government defeated the Opposition motion but not before Liberal Democrat Members of

Parliament had split to vote with the Government, against the Government and abstaining or

absenting themselves. So the fate of the bedroom tax and the housing circumstances of social

housing tenants has become part of a broader game of political chess.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that in the second half of the parliament the

Liberal Democrats have tried to differentiate from the Conservatives. More recently the

Liberal Democrat President, Tim Farron, has made a number of speeches against the

bedroom tax (Guardian, 2014). While Farron is known to be well-attuned to the concerns of

the partys grassroots, others have observed that these moves may also be about positioning

in readiness for a future bid for the party leadership. So the fate of the bedroom tax has

become tangled up in Liberal Democrat internal politics as well. While it is difficult to assess

the counterfactual meaningfully, it would not be unreasonable to argue that had the welfare

reform bill, and the bedroom tax provisions in particular, started its legislatively journal later

in the parliamentary term it would not have secured sufficient support from the Liberal

Democrats to pass into law.

To further compound the political complexity, the bedroom tax is unpopular in the Welsh and

Scottish devolved administrations. The Scottish administration has put in place further

financial support to mitigate the impacts of the bedroom tax, as well as being formally

committed to its abolition. Welfare reform has yet to arrive in Northern Ireland, but it is

expected that similar provisions will be introduced there. However, it has recently been

speculated that the Conservatives are in discussion with politicians from Northern Ireland

about the possibility of forming a coalition after the May 2015 elections so the

Conservatives do not need to go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats again and relief

from the worst effects of welfare reform is a key bargaining chip.

The political sensitivities of welfare reform, and the bedroom tax in particular, were

dramatically highlighted by the interventions of Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur on

adequate housing. Rolnik visited the UK in September 2013 and called for the bedroom tax to

be abolished. She suggested that it is possible that the policy constitutes a violation of the

human right to adequate housing, although that is a source of some expert disagreement. This

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call for abolition was repeated when Rolnik reported in December 2013. The Government

housing minister, from the Conservative party, dismissed the UN special rapporteurs work in

uncompromisingly undiplomatic language:

This partisan report is completely discredited, and it is disappointing that the United

Nations has allowed itself to be associated with a misleading Marxist diatribe

(Guardian, 2014b)

This statement is perhaps starker than usual, but it is characteristic of the Conservatives

current approach to responding to criticism. In part it has to be understood in relation to the

hostility among parts of the Conservative party to the whole concept of human rights and in

relation to issues of sovereignty and the relationship between the UK government and

international institutions. From this perspective, if a favoured policy is deemed to have

breached human rights that is not so much a problem with the policy but a further

demonstration of the folly of human rights legislation and further evidence of the

unacceptable interference in domestic affairs by outsiders.

6. Institutions matter

The question of human rights legislation enters the bedroom tax story more directly. The

changes to the regulations are layered on top of a range of more fundamental rights and

obligations, as well as established legal precedent. The bedroom tax has generated a

significant industry in legal challenges (which are being tracked by the lawyers at

nearlylegal.co.uk).

These legal cases take a variety of forms. The Government opened itself up to legal challenge

right from the start by failing to define what constituted a bedroom. It left it up to individual

local authorities to use their own definition. Is it, for example, a room originally designed as a

bedroom or a room currently being used as a bedroom? The Government has suffered some

serious legal setbacks, including cases that brought to light the fact that there are a substantial

number of tenants who had been subject to the bedroom tax who should have been exempt.

The Government moved to close the legal loophole, but not before tens of thousands of

tenants had had their housing benefit reduced inappropriately. The media made much of the

more extreme cases, including at least one where the tenant had committed suicide as a result

of financial stress, only for it to be discovered that the bedroom tax should not have been

applied. All this adds up to further erosion of the support for the policy. Not only was it seen

as unfair, but the regulations were ineptly drafted and badly implemented.

Appeals against the bedroom tax are being decided quite frequently. Many of the cases take

place at so-called First Tier Tribunals, where decisions do not set legal precedents. A small

number, so far, have reached higher tribunals and courts and are setting precedents. Quite a

number of the cases have had a human rights dimension part of the claim is that the

consequence of the bedroom tax is a breach of the right to adequate housing.

14

An important recent development is a ruling that appears to conclude that the bedroom tax

policy does not represent a breach of human rights, but only so long as Discretionary Housing

Payments are available to support the tenants to live in appropriate accommodation

accommodation that they are deemed not to be eligible for once the under-occupancy

regulations are applied.

The implications of this ruling are yet to be fully understood or worked through. But on the

face of it the ruling undermines one of the fundamental premises of the Governments

reforms. That is, that DHPs are transitional relief that will be eventually be removed or the

household will move to an appropriate smaller property. The courts would appear to be

saying that in certain cases the tenants current property constitutes adequate accommodation

and a smaller property would not, so the Government has an obligation to subsidize the

current level of housing consumption in perpetuity unless it wishes to intentionally effect a

breach of the tenants human rights.

7. Conclusion

The bedroom tax is a live policy and there are episodes regularly being added to the story. In

particular, there is a lot of activity in the tribunals and courts. Appeals are being concluded

almost weekly.

The story that has been told so far is a story that starts with an idea the reframing of what

constitutes fairness in the housing subsidy system. But it is also the story of a battle over the

language of policy, recognising that how we talk about policies matter. Words can be

freighted with all sorts of meanings. They resonate in planned and unplanned ways. The

word tax carries particular resonance in UK debates. And the term bedroom tax has

traction in a media-saturated political environment. The opposition party has put those words

to work effectively in a situation where they were politically relatively weak, having left a

long period of government having sustained significant reputational damage.

Labour have been helped by the complexity of the political landscape in the UK at the

moment. In particular, the Liberal Democrats as a party have faced a conflict between their

understanding of what is in the national interest, their understanding of what is in interests of

their party and accords with their partys political philosophy, and the interests of particular

key actors within the party. The Conservatives drove the welfare reform legislation through

Parliament at a stage in the political cycle when they could secure Liberal Democrat support.

In the current period of political differentiation when the parties are turning to look to their

own party interests rather than the national interest it is much less certain that this policy

change could have been achieved.

The complexity of welfare reform given the institutions of the devolved UK governance

structure are clear. While social security policy is UK-wide, it has to interface with not only

the devolved governments and devolved housing policy, but also diverging housing and

15

labour markets. The bedroom tax has very different implications in different parts of the

country.

We are now in a situation where key political parties in the UK are either committed to the

abolition of the bedroom tax already or are likely to commit themselves to doing so. And that

includes the minority party in the current coalition that voted it into law. The parties are

currently drafting their manifestos for the next general election. It will be interesting to see

where and how the bedroom tax is addressed by each party. It is quite possible that the policy

will die at the next election.

But what the regulations will look like by the time we reach the election next year is

uncertain. The change in the regulations in layered on top of a range of existing institutions,

most especially foundational legal provisions about rights. While the UK remains part of the

EU and a party to a range of international conventions, domestic law will have to have regard

to these rights. The bedroom tax has been, and continues to be, challenged. This is gradually

leading to modifications of our understanding of how the policy can work on the ground. It

would only require one of the cases to reach a higher court and a significant human-rights

based judgment to be handed down and cemented into place for the whole system to be

turned on its axis and for the intentions behind the policy to be entirely neutralised.

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About the author

Alex Marsh is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Bristol. He has been Head of the

School for Policy Studies since 2007. Alexs research and writing has encompassed a wide

range of topics in the fields of housing studies, public policy and regulation.

Between 2005 and 2009 Alex has been managing editor of Housing Studies, the leading

international academic journal in the field. He continues as a member of the journals

Management Board.

Alex worked part-time as a Visiting Academic Consultant to the Public Law team at the Law

Commission between 2006 and 2010. His work with the Commission addressed compliance

issues in the private rented sector and systems of redress against public bodies.

Between 2004 and 2012 Alex was a trustee of Brunelcare, a Bristol-based charity providing

housing, care and support for older people. For six years he chaired Brunelcare's Audit and

Scrutiny Committee. In October 2013 he joined the board of Curo Group as a Non-Executive

Director.

www.alex-marsh.net

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