In some areas on the continent, especially mediterranean small towns, I believe it is quite common for terraced housing to interchange rooms between units, according to demand. So if one family needs more space and a neighbour less, they just create and remove doors to add an extra room to one apartment at the expense of another.
The tragedy here is that housing is generally made up of two or three bedroom units. One bedroom accommodation is comparatively rare. So people end up in the units available to them.
The bedroom tax is one of the all-time stupidest ideas any government in the history of this country could ever have come up with - and that for a country that invented the window tax (where you get round it by bricking up windows) or the hearth tax (where you just brick up the chimneys) - and suffer from living in the dark and cold if you are poor.
But bringing in a tax if you are on benefits that penalises you for being in a unit that has more rooms than this new tax allows, when rent or buy, it is amazingly hard to move to alternative accommodation, demonstrates truly incredible stupidity.
Public school boys should never be allowed in government.... they're supposed to be used as officers that get everyone killed in battle, not actually running a country in modern times.
What is really so sad about all these measures is they are so ill thought out they end up costing far more than they were supposed to save.
Part of the trouble is the DWP has been shown time and time again to be incompetent.
But the main problem is spiteful solutions to worries about financial losses from benefits and an ideological opposition to the benefits culture only comes up with crude punitive remedies rather than constructive ones actually safeguarding the needy while successfully removing the abusers. In fact I'll bet the abusers of the system are still finding ways around it.
Now if they had introduced a threshold of one bedroom above the ascertained minimum, it would have been so much more effective. Because the abusers were those people living in ten bedroomed mansions while on benefit. Not the honest majority living in basic unit homes designed with two or three bedrooms.
But I guess you cannot expect rocket science from public school boys......
