Meeting the people affected by the Bedroom Tax makes it really hit home

Sometimes in the cut and thrust of politics, it takes a real-life example to emphasise the unfairness of an issue that MPs may have debated at length in Westminster. However much you talk over the theory or discuss the principle, it is the reality which can stop you in your tracks and make you question how politicians can get something so badly wrong.

Rarely has that been more apparent in my constituency than in the recent case of Hayley Sims, the 39-year-old mother of a severely disabled five-year-old boy. Hayley works tirelessly to look after and protect Reuben, who has very little muscular movement and does most of his communication via slight eye movements. She asks for nothing more than to be able to get on with being the best mum she possibly can to a son with heart problems and a life-limiting condition.

But to the Tory-led Government, she is an easy target. That’s why David Cameron’s bedroom tax hit Hayley with a 14 per cent cut in the housing benefit she receives all because she has a spare room.

And the room in question is hardly a luxurious spare room for guests or fun-filled playroom for Hayley’s other child. It is more akin to a hospital ward, kitted out almost entirely with the abundance of medical supplies required to provide around-the-clock support to Rueben.

Fortunately, I am delighted to have been able to have helped Hayley successfully challenge the Government’s decision. But how many other victims of the Tory-led Government’s Bedroom Tax have not been so fortunate?

How many other families have been penalised for having a so-called ‘spare’ room, despite the very idea of it being spare rather than vital to that family’s existence being nothing short of ludicrous?

And that’s why the bedroom tax is so totally unfair. It supposes that a bedroom not having somebody sleeping in it seven nights a week somehow implies affluence. It clearly does not. In Hayley’s case, it was because of the medical supplies required to care for her son. But there are many more examples of people being hit with the bedroom tax for all the wrong reasons.

Is a single parent suddenly financially better off just because they want their children to have a bedroom of their own on the two nights a week they spend with them? Are the families of servicemen and women instantly enriched because they keep a room ready for their son or daughter while they are away bravely representing our country in the name of Queen and country?

Of course not. There are hundreds of reasons why somebody might have a so-called ‘spare’ room, and I can’t think of any that ought to result in that person being financially penalised. The Bedroom Tax has been an unexplainable travesty from the outset. Hayley Sims is just one of many people being punished by an unjustifiable Government tax on vulnerable people.

Labour has already said it will abolish the Bedroom Tax if it wins the next General Election.

If the Tories had an ounce of decency about them they would get in their first and admit it was one huge mistake. But while there are many words I could use to describe the actions overseen by Messrs Cameron and Clegg over the last four years, “decent” is not one of them.