Verified answer

No. We should scrap the bedroom tax!

I can't want until labour brings in the Mansion tax and I will really love to see rich people being evicted from their mansions or bailiffs taking away their luxury goods.

I'm fed up of the poor and disabled being treat like criminals by this Tory government.

These working class people need to get real and stop voting Tory. The Tories only support the rich and people with good luck on their side.

"Let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a Tory motto.

Well Its time the rich payed up, and endured the misery we poor do. For example Instead of a spot of golf, how about 30 hrs a week of Workfare community pay back?

May 2015 will be good bye and good riddance to Camoron, Duncan smith and their mate Cleggy.

I for one can't wait for that!

A housing officer visited her because of the arrears. Now there is something wrong here as the housing officer would have told her about what extra money she could claim on top of her £90 a week. Bearing in mind that her rent and Council tax was already being paid for her and she was only £210 in arrears there is no way the council would have sent the bailiffs in to evict her. They would have had to get a court order first and only evicted her as a last resort. An arrangement to repay the arrears at £1 would have been made.

This woman has neighbours so why did she not ask them what the letters contained. She asked for a larger print version before the housing officer visited her!

Sorry but there is more to this than meets the eye. If she is that vulnerable the council would have rehomed her in sheltered accommodation.

This so called bedroom tax only affects people on benefits living in property too big for their needs. Benefits come out of the public purse and are paid for by the taxpayer.

As for Simons answer. He seems to be under the impression that people owning a £1million house have money coming out of their backsides. It is money on paper and does not necessary mean that they are living life on the hog. Property prices have risen so much especially in London that has seen many peoples house prices increase. Their income hasn't!!

Poor Carol, lovely photo of her in the bus shelter too, very emotive indeed, that's some good journalism.

Look, I've said it before, she was free to downsize, we go on about a shortage of social housing and overcrowding but the fact is if people stopped hogging places with multiple rooms when all they need is one, then with a bit of relocation we can have this problem under a bit more control. Why couldn't she move into a one bedroom? There's just one of her whilst a couple with a child are crammed into a one bedroom waiting for rehousing and can't be rehoused until someone offers to swap because of the housing shortage.

Why couldn't Carol downsize? The journalist doesn't seem to have asked her that, instead s/he wants to tell me about her pension allowance and her being desperate to keep warm etc. None of that is relevant to why she was evicted, she was evicted because of a failure to pay the spare room subsidy. If she couldn't afford it then a no spare room subsidy aka a one bedroom flat was what she needed to request.

I don't want to see an old woman booted out onto the streets I promise, but it could have been avoided even if she didn't have the money, that's what gets me. It's not a lack of finance that has seen her homeless, it's a refusal to do her bit. We all have to do what we can in these times, there's no room (no pun intended) for selfishness

The Daily Mirror, corny? Not exactly an unbaised source then!

It is no use relying on the ill-thought our mansion tax. The paltry sum it will raise in real terms will go nowhere to solving the many problems in the NHS which have more to do with organisation rather than money. However it is Labour's favourite political toy and they know some people are massively impressed at the notion of more money being thrown at it. There will NEVER be enough money to keep the NHS going.

The masion tax is in effect a tax on London and many ordinary people who bought modest homes there decades ago who have seen their properties shoot up in value.

If you really want to tax those who really ARE rich I suggest a hefty tax on designer clothes for a start. All the rich celebs with more money than sense and their silly footballer boyfriends and husbands ought to be the ones coughing up. And the pop groups who also make obscene fortunes for little or no ability.

I bet taxing them would raise far more than the mansion tax, the owners of which will sell up, or split them into flats or find ways of valuing them below the threshold.

And on the subject of evicting people from their homes, please don't forget - although I know you will have done - that is was Labour who first proposed kicking elderly people out of their own paid-for homes to rehouse larger families.

The unpalatable truth is the welfare bill is massive and the way it works now encourages people to think they have a right to expect the taxpayer to fund their lifestyle. This cannot continue so I think the spare room subsidy is fair and reasonable with the proviso that the affected person does have an offer of somewhere else to live.

Many working people would like bigger houses but don't because they can't. It is wholly unfair for those having their accommodation paid for or subsidised to have what those who support themselves cannot.

But when was Labour ever about fairness!!!! And the spiteful comments here represent their type of resentment politics.

It just shows how isolated people feel these days..this woman had nobody, no family, no friends, no neighbours, no-one to help her read her mail. Before we attack 'the system'what does this say about society, US? IF nobody visited this woman for A MONTH, she could have slipped and died and no-one would have known. What a disgrace. She should ask for her BR rax to be stopped straight from pension/dole. Ok, she doesn't wanna pay, actually I don't wanna pay council tax either.

With the house shortages in london they had to do something.

Why should 1 or 2 people by allowed to buy a freaking 5 bedroom house while a couple with 2 kids cant find a 1 bedroom house?! They can afford a 4 bedroom house but there just arnt any available because there all being taken by these rich, single old crows!

no

i read this on another question here

iraqi asylum seekers on £500 a week housing benefit rent out their luxury london apartments for £3000 a week to rich tourists ---- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2772214/Ir...

just marvelous how all these people getting evicted for failure to pay bedroom tax are white indigenous english --- not a single ethnic or immigrant, who get priority for all social housing & usually have a clan of children to insure they don't have to pay bedroom tax or ever lose their homes.

we should deport all foreign parasites, then we'll have homes for people like that woman.

This seems implausible :

"When I started getting letters from the council I couldn’t read them. I asked them to send the details in bigger print – but they never did. So I ignored them until a housing officer turned up and told me I was in arrears with bedroom tax payments."

She thought the letters important enough to request larger font type, but didn't seek to ask what they were about?

The bedroom tax is an evil tax invented by the vile Devil worshiping Tories and hits the poorest of our people the hardest.

Vote Labour in May 2015 and lets get a massive £200 per day mansion tax in place on all properties valued at £2 million and above.

As Dennis Healy once said, Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak!

Forward Britain with a Progressive Socialist Programme to benefit all of our people.

Certainly not. I find it chilling to read the nonsensical excuses that people find to justify IDS's barbarity. The more I see such opinions, the more anger I feel about the callousness of it all.