REFORMS to cut housing benefit from council and housing association tenants with spare rooms - branded a bedroom tax by critics - have saved taxpayers £1 million a day since they were imposed a year ago, according to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
On the first anniversary of the controversial cutback, the department released figures showing that almost half a million households were having cash deducted from their benefits.
Under the new rules, social housing tenants deemed to have one more bedroom than they need lose 14% of their eligible rent and those with two or more lose 25%. DWP figures showed that in November 2013, 498,000 social housing tenants in England, Scotland and Wales were having their benefits reduced under the policy.
Changes to housing benefit in the social rented sector are expected to save £490m in 2013/14 and a total of around £1 billion by the end of 2014/15, equating to more than £1.3m per day, the DWP said.
However, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations said social housing providers were facing spiralling costs and falling revenues due to the Westminster Government's reforms and branded the policy "unfair and incompetent".
Maureen Watson, the organisation's head of policy, said: "Whilst taking a cautious view in our modelling, we have still arrived at an overall cost of the bedroom tax for Scottish housing associations and co-operatives of almost £80m over three years.
"This will, ultimately, drive up rents and, ironically, increase the cost of the housing benefit bill for the UK Government."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article