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And so, having ‘done this to death’, the bedroom tax and the Welfare Reform Bill have passed their final parliamentary hurdle.

The quote came from welfare reform minister Lord Freud as peers debated a final attempt to amend the under-occupation penalty. It may have been accurate in terms of the parliamentary procedure but it will have a hollow ring for landlords and tenants as they spend the next 13 months agonising about how a measure that will cost 670,000 people £14 per week will be implemented.

Freud was responding to an amendment by Lord Best seeking an independent review of the impact of the measure on poverty, homelessness, under-occupancy, local authority resources and rent arrears six months after the tax is implemented.

Lord Best had begun with an (unnecessary) apology ‘to those who hoped that this House would save the day but will now be deeply disappointed’. The Commons had rejected his two previous amendments and even the apparent concession of £30 million in discretionary housing payments for disabled people and foster carers was funded by increasing the bedroom tax on everyone else. So now he changed tack with the call for a research.

Lord Freud pledged an evaluation that would involve key stakeholders in developing evaluation research that would include the wider social impacts, the implementation strategy and draft guidance. But he said the key issue was that not about making people move but making social as well as private tenants make informed choices about ‘where they live and what they can afford’. People could choose to stay and meet the shortfall with options including employment, increasing their working hours, asking others in the household or extended family to contribute or taking in a lodger although he did not add his statement two weeks ago that ‘the designation of property size is another area where there may be flexibility’. The minister concluded: ‘We have now done this to death and I close by asking the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.’

Lord Best did so but he still had time for one last telling speech on the issue. He had received an email from a woman with a partially disabled husband who was also a full-time carer for her mother living nearby. She faced a charge of an extra £25 per week. ‘She has looked into the possibility of moving elsewhere and she can move some miles away. However, she is not going to be able to get back to see her mother twice or three times a day. She cannot afford that £25 a week and is going to have to do something. These are the kinds of social network issues that are raised by this measure.’

He went on: ‘I hope that the minister does not get the blame when the housing benefit bill does not fall.’

And so now it’s over to landlords and tenants to decide how the bedroom tax will work on the ground when it is implemented from April 2013.

As MPs and peers have argued, this is a Treasury-dictated measure that is all about cutting the housing benefit bill. If it were about fairness (to private sector tenants who already get charged for under-occupancy) there would be exemptions for people who cannot be offered alternative accommodation and transitional arrangements for existing tenants. Instead, we are left with a crude and arbitrary tax that threatens to drive tenants into the arms of doorstep lenders and landlords reluctantly into the courts.

The implications for disabled people, for people who were allocated a larger home as part of their landlord’s policy, for single parents and for all the other people affected (as Lord Freud complacently put it: ‘on this measure, of the 3.3 million tenants living in the social rented sector and receiving housing benefit, only about one in five is expected to be affected by this change’) have only been worked out on the back of an envelope so far. Other impending changes such as cuts in council tax benefit will complicate things even further.

And that’s before we get to the rest of the Welfare Reform Bill and especially the sections on disability. A report out today from the parliamentary joint committee on human rights concludes that ‘the range of reforms proposed to housing benefit, disability living allowance, the independent living find, and changes to eligibility criteria risk interacting in a particularly harmful way for disabled people’. And it warns that the cumulative impact risks the UK being in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities giving disabled people a human right to independent living. .

That’s just one example of how a consideration of the implications of the bedroom tax and the rest of the Bill are about as far from being ‘done to death’ as it is possible to get.