Around 4,000 Shropshire families to be hit by Bedroom tax
Around 4,000 Shropshire families are set to be hit by the government’s ‘Bedroom Tax’ from April losing on average £728 per year.
The Bedroom Tax will hit 660,000 households nationwide, two thirds of them home to someone with a disability at exactly the same time as the government gives a massive £100,000 tax cut to 13,000 millionaires.
Around 2,000 households in Telford & Wrekin and 2,440 in the Shropshire Council area will be hit.
Telford MP, David Wright:
“David Cameron’s Bedroom Tax will hammer families in Telford & Wrekin already struggling to make ends meet, and could actually risk costing local tax-payers a fortune in higher private rents and covering the cost of driving people out of their homes.
“Two thirds of the households hit are home to someone with a disability, and the families of soldiers and foster parents will also be hit. Yet at the same time millionaires are getting a massive tax cut. How can that be right?”
Elizabeth Humphreys, West Midlands lead manager for the National Housing Federation says:
"The Government’s bedroom tax is flawed and will unfairly penalise thousands of people in the West Midlands who have lived in their homes for years, raised families and contributed to their communities.
"The ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach takes no account of disabled people’s adapted homes, of foster parents who need rooms to take children in, or of parents sharing custody who will lose the room for their child at weekends.
"In most areas, there just aren’t enough smaller affordable homes for these families to move into to avoid the tax. Many people will find themselves having to move into more expensive privately rented properties - adding to the overall housing benefit bill.
"The bedroom tax shows just how detached Ministers are from the lives of families who will be hit. The high housing benefit bill is because there are not enough affordable homes, so the best way to cut the bill is to build more."
The National Housing Federation is calling on the Government to repeal this ill-conceived policy, but at the very least exempt disabled and other vulnerable people from these cuts before it comes into effect on 1 April.
