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Northern Ireland government agrees to extend bedroom tax payments
Northern Ireland’s fledgling government has agreed to continue paying the bedroom tax on behalf of 38,000 households beyond the end of March.
Communities minister Deirdre Hargey announced today that fellow ministers in the Executive have backed her recommendation to extend the welfare mitigation payments from April.
She added that legislation to extend the payments will be tabled “in the coming weeks”.
However, it will only cover the Social Sector Size Criteria – commonly known as the bedroom tax – with Ms Hargey saying that mitigations for other welfare cuts, such as the benefit cap, “need to be looked at”.
The Department for Communities (DfC) estimates another 1,500 households across the region are eligible to have their benefits capped.
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As one of its last acts before collapsing in January 2017, Northern Ireland’s previous government introduced mitigation payments to insulate people from Westminster-imposed welfare reforms such as the bedroom tax, which reduces the amount of housing benefit paid to social housing tenants deemed to have more bedrooms than they need.
With no ministers in place at Stormont until last month to extend the payments, there had been fears that households subject to the policy were set to see their income fall off a cliff edge.
A document setting out a plan for Northern Ireland’s new government committed to extending welfare mitigation payments.
Ms Hargey said: “We have a responsibility to protect the poorest and most vulnerable in society. I am pleased to announce that today the Executive agreed to my recommendation, in line with New Decade, New Approach, for the urgent extension of the bedroom tax mitigation beyond March 2020.”
She added: “There are also other mitigations which need to be looked at as we review the mitigation measures we committed to in New Decade, New Approach. I will continue to work with stakeholders in moving forward with that important piece of work.”
Heather Wilson, policy and engagement manager at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) Northern Ireland, said: “In practice the bedroom tax is incompatible with our context here in Northern Ireland, given the lack of appropriate housing stock and communal segregation.
“We are pleased that the minister has acted swiftly to calls from the sector to extend the welfare mitigations to protect households from the bedroom tax.”
The CIH will ask the DfC to confirm that tenants who lost their welfare payments as a result of moving home will continue to be protected.
