What will YOU do when the bedroom tax comes in in April 2013?

Hansard Lords 14 Feb:- Welfare reform bill says that people with 1 empty room on Housing benefit from April 2013 will have to pay extra £14 a week. 2 rooms empty £25 a week.

What will you do?

Move?
Take a lodger in ( what Lord Freud suggests )?
Eat less?
Heat Less?
What a fucking lousy country we are becoming

Yes.

I've got 1

Shades of the window tax.
I'll brick up the room.

Turn it into a kinky dungeon.

Convert the spare bedroom into a library - as these seem to be under threat too.

The trouble is that the Condems will use the councils official documents to define how many bedrooms a dwelling has

Hansard Feb 14th Column 711

The landlords will be asked to be the tax collectors of the £14 per week from each liable tenant to make up the weekly deficit on the rent that the penalty will create. They know that they will have a huge job identifying who may be eligible. I am grateful for the reassurance from the Minister that there will not be an army of snoopers to check on whether a young person has left home or is away for just a few weeks. But landlords will have the problems of collecting the £14 per week or £25 per week if there are two rooms. That will not be covered by housing benefit any more.

Any room that could have a bed in will be defined a "bedroom". The exceptions are kitchens and bathrooms.

Calling it a "study", "library" or "sitting room" will be futile.

This is a 1 bedroom flat, and defined by Lambeth council as that. So no change from the bedroom tax here.

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will take your biological and technological distinctiveness and add it to our own. Your culture will assimilate to service us. Resistance is futile.

what if you said you had 3 kitchens and 2 bathrooms ?

Then for every pound in rent you get they'll stop the same from your benefits.

This.

1 bedroom is over mine and next door hallway so I could sell them the spare room.

If they were planning on introducing triple council tax on second homes at the same time I may have some support for the policy. There are a lot of rooms being left empty and I can't see why this should be subsidised.

Just stick a loo in the corner of each room.

They're even doing this to families who have kids occupying the bedrooms. Apparently they're meant to share, altho I don't know quite how many per room is the limit. They were also planning on fucking over non res parents with a 'spare' room for their kid and foster carers this way ffs.

At what stage/age do brother and sister not have to share?

Some Councils were looking into scrapping the second home CT discount, which has kind of inspired boroughs like Islington to take it one step further and seek to scrap the single person 25% discount.

IIRC it was 10 years old.

This will never happen.

"Tory room share demand for siblings causes incest rise!"

I'd like to think you're right, but given the other things which have been pushed through, I think this one will happen.

Knock all the interior walls down and make it into a studio.

I thought the house of lords had put the kybosh on this?

In Germany, that oh so social democratic paradise, it is by the metre, seriously

With their housing (more than 60% apartments in miethaus-type blocks in most cities), it actually makes more sense, especially as many of the places are so substantially-built that shifting internal walls isn't a problem, and doesn't offend against the lease.
Try doing that here, and the landlord would ride you out of town on a rail!

The government said they would use the Parliament Act 1911 to get the bill through regardless of what the Lords vote for.

what, do living rooms come under this as well? fucking appalling, they want to turn all of these houses into slums

Surely they don't - does anyone actually know for sure? Googling hasn't given me an answer.