Under-occupancy Penalty (Nottingham) – Parliamentary Debate

Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab): “Nowhere to go”—that is how today’s Nottingham Post describes the crisis facing thousands of social tenants in our city. Why? Because two weeks today the Government are set to play the cruellest joke on more than 6,000 of our city’s poorest households. On the same day as they deliver a huge tax cut to the UK’s highest earners, they plan to take £4.23 million from the pockets of those people in our city who are least able to afford it. Whether we call it the bedroom tax, the under-occupancy penalty or the spare-room subsidy, it is a heartless policy which, the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research concluded, will create “severe hardship” for affected households. 

In Nottingham, 6,103 people face the bedroom tax in two weeks’ time. The key website is Homelink, which advertises properties for the arm’s length management organisation, Nottingham City Homes, and most of the local housing associations. This week, 21 one-bedroom properties and 14 two-bedroom properties are available. So even if they were all allocated to households that are currently under-occupying, that would help only 35 households—fewer than 1% of those affected. That is before one considers the 2,269 families in Nottingham waiting for a two-bedroom property, or the 7,333 individuals or couples waiting for a one-bedroom property.

In my constituency, 1,423 households are affected by the bedroom tax. In the whole of the last 12 months only 175 of Nottingham City Homes’ one or two-bedroom properties became available to let in Nottingham South, and on average people had waited 78 weeks on the list.

Read more on the Parliament website.