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Not for citation without the authors permission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 17
th
February 2013. It was not until late February that it was used by a Government
minister and not until 28
th
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.
11

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
13

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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