Appeal against the bedroom tax!

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There’s a judgement that says a bedroom is a room furnished as a bedroom or used to sleep in. All bedroom tax decisions can be appealed. Time is running out to appeal.

The Bedroom Tax is Dead here’s why | SPeye Joe (Welfarewrites)

Bedroom Tax – Finally Killed by Plain Old Common-Sense?

The effect of this outbreak of common-sense is that, potentially, any or all of the original Bedroom Tax decisions taking effect last April are wrong – as councils cannot have known the actual situation and were making decisions based on an assumption that the rooms concerned were bedrooms. What’s more, despite the time elapsed since then, these decisions are still appealable – appeals can be accepted up to thirteen months after the date of the original decision. This clearly makes it important to act quickly. Anyone in any doubt about the correctness of their Bedroom Tax decision should write to the local authority decision-maker and seek an appeal in their own individual case. But this must be done soon – it will probably be too late by April.

The implications of this legal development may even go so far as to invalidate all of the decisions. If a room isn’t habitually used as a bedroom, it may fall outwith the normal everyday definition of the word – and therefore beyond the scope of the legislation as it stands. Technically, in order to assess whether a particular room qualifies as a “bedroom”, the local authority would have to go out and inspect it. In practice, this would be a task on a scale made impossible by limitations on resources. But unless a property has been thus assessed, then no decision can properly be made.

 

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