A/HRC/25/54/Add.2 work poverty. According to Oxfam, between 2010 and 2014, total public spending by the United Kingdom will have been cut by 11.5 per cent. Public sector wages have already been frozen and, over the period 2010–2018, 1.1 million public sector jobs are to be cut, with twice as many women as men losing their jobs. Real wages are reported to have fallen by 3.2 per cent, returning to 2003 levels, representing a lost decade for the average worker.57 More worrisome, in 2011/12, about 13 million people lived in poverty in the United Kingdom; of those, more than half (6.7 million) were in a working family.58 1. Removal of the spare-room subsidy 46. The removal of the spare-room subsidy is part of the housing-benefits reform and came into force on 1 April 2013, without having been piloted in advance. It is also known as an under-occupancy penalty, and colloquially as a “bedroom tax”. The measure reduces the housing benefit that social sector tenants of working-age receive, based on the number of bedrooms in the property and the composition of the household. The rate of reduction of the eligible rent for the housing benefit varies from 14 per cent per one spare bedroom to 25 per cent for two or more spare bedrooms. A tenant can claim one bedroom for each single adult or couple; a child would be expected to share with one other child of the same gender (if under 16) or regardless of gender (if both are under 10). Additional considerations are taken into account for tenants with disabilities; in cases where external carers provide regular overnight care to a tenant or partner; and for foster carers.59 In Scotland the government estimates that this reform will affect about 82,000 households, costing them an average of 50 pounds a month, with 80 per cent of those households including an adult with disabilities and 15,500 of the total cases consisting of families with children.60 47. Besides the austerity argument of reducing the cost of housing benefits, the Government considered this reform to be a way of allocating housing by size criteria, addressing overcrowding and under-occupancy, and introducing greater fairness between private and social renters. From the start, numerous concerns were raised by housing experts, charities, housing associations and councils. For example, the National Housing Federation remarked that many landlords support people to downsize from their property to free up badly needed family-size homes. It also noted, however, that the Department for Work and Pensions, in its impact assessment, has admitted there is a mismatch between household size and the availability of suitable homes in the social sector for underoccupying claimants to downsize into. The Federation quotes the Department as saying: “In many areas this mismatch could mean that there are insufficient properties to enable tenants to move to accommodation of an appropriate size even if tenants wished to move and landlords were able to facilitate this movement.”61 48. In order to assist with the transition to this policy, the Department for Work and Pensions allocated a ring-fenced fund for all local authorities of the United Kingdom to make discretionary housing payments (DHPs) to those with a temporary or short-term shortfall in housing costs. This fund has been available since 2001, but in response to specific welfare reforms that affected housing benefit entitlements, including the Local Housing Allowance (LHA), the spare-room subsidy and the overall benefit cap, the total amount available has been considerably increased a few times in the last two years, 57 58 59 60 61 12 Oxfam, “A cautionary tale: the true cost of austerity and inequality in Europe” (2013), pp. 8 and 11. Tom MacInnes et. al., Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2013 (Joseph Rowntree Foundation/New Policy Institute, 2013), p. 26. Welfare Reform Act (2012). See also Department for Work and Pensions, “Housing benefit: under occupation of social housing” (2012). Scotland, Welfare Reform Committee, “The ‘bedroom tax’ in Scotland” (2013), para. 1. NHF, “Briefing – Welfare Reform Act 2012: Size Criteria”, p. 7.