UK ‘shocking’ bedroom tax should be axed, says UN...

[HipChick]

War on the poor continues....in the UK, the govt. makes you pay if you have a spare room...They started with the disabled people making them feel even more desperate and many committed suicide..

Social housing in the UK is deteriorating and “is almost a lottery” argues UN housing expert Raquel Rolnik. Her claims that the ‘shocking’ bedroom tax affects the most vulnerable citizens drew fire from the Tories who called her report ‘a disgrace’.

The United Nations special investigator on housing has called on the British government to scrap its unpopular bedroom tax, officially known as the spare room subsidy, after hearing “shocking” accounts of how the policy is affecting some of Britain’s most vulnerable people.
Rolnik singled out the bedroom tax as affecting “the most vulnerable, the most fragile, the people who are on the fringes of coping with everyday life.”

“I was very shocked to hear how people really feel abused in their human rights by this decision and why – being so vulnerable – they should pay for the cost of the economic downturn, which was brought about by the financial crisis. People in testimonies were crying, saying 'I have nowhere to go,' 'I will commit suicide,'" she said in an interview with the Guardian of her findings.

Carol Robertson is a council tenant in Edinburgh where many older buildings owned by the council have two or more bedrooms. She has lost £13 a week because of the spare room subsidy and now has just 26 a week to live on. As the winter draws in she says she will save extra money by not turning the lights on. “It sounds preposterous, but I think people will save on the electricity and use candles. I won’t put my lights on; I will just buy candles,” she told Rolnik, The Guardian reports. Carol wanted to remain in the two-bedroom flat where she brought up her two children and so had to pay the spare room supplement designed to push people like her out of her flat, which is deemed too big for a person living on their own. When central heating was being recently installed in the council block, Carol chose not be connected. “I knew I couldn’t afford it. If I get cold I just put on my jumper,” she said. Her neighbor next door is even worse off, and after paying the supplement has just £4 a week to live on. She says she can’t move because there are no smaller properties for her to move into in Edinburgh and she wouldn’t know anyone in a completely new area, so she has to pay the subsidy even though it leaves her with so little to live on.

More:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/woman-threatened-eviction-uninhabitable-house-3112557

http://rt.com/news/uk-bedroom-tax-protest-734/