A qualitative study of the impact of the UK ‘bedroom tax’

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Abstract

Background

The implementation of the ‘Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy’ in April 2013, commonly known as the ‘bedroom tax’, affects an estimated 660 000 working age social housing tenants in the UK, reducing weekly incomes by £12–£22. This study aimed to examine the impact of this tax on health and wellbeing in a North East England community in which 68.5% of residents live in social housing.

Methods

Qualitative study using interviews and a focus group with 38 social housing tenants and 12 service providers.

Results

Income reduction affected purchasing power for essentials, particularly food and utilities. Participants recounted negative impacts on mental health, family relationships and community networks. The hardship and debt that people experienced adversely affected their social relationships and ability to carry out normal social roles. Residents and service providers highlighted negative impacts on the neighbourhood, as well as added pressure on already strained local services.

Conclusions

The bedroom tax has increased poverty and had broad-ranging adverse effects on health, wellbeing and social relationships within this community. These findings strengthen the arguments for revoking this tax.

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Most cited references 5

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Perceptions of social capital and the built environment and mental health.

Stephen Palmer, Ricardo Araya, Frank Dunstan … (2006)

There has been much speculation about a possible association between the social and built environment and health, but the empirical evidence is still elusive. The social and built environments are best seen as contextual concepts but they are usually estimated as an aggregation of individual compositional measures, such as perceptions on trust or the desirability to live in an area. If these aggregated compositional measures were valid measures, one would expect that they would evince correlations at higher levels of data collection (e.g., neighbourhood). The aims of this paper are: (1) to investigate the factor structure of a self-administered questionnaire measuring individual perceptions of trust, social participation, social cohesion, social control, and the built environment; (2) to investigate variation in these factors at higher than the individual level (households and postcodes) in order to assess if these constructs reflect some contextual effect; and (3) to study the association between mental health, as measured by the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12), and these derived factors. A cross-sectional household survey was undertaken during May-August 2001 in a district of South Wales with a population of 140,000. We found that factor analysis grouped our questions in factors similar to the theoretical ones we had previously envisaged. We also found that approximately one-third of the variance for neighbourhood quality and 10% for social control was explained at postcode (neighbourhood) level after adjusting for individual variables, thus suggesting that some of our compositional measures capture contextual characteristics of the built and social environment. After adjusting for individual variables, trust and social cohesion, two key social capital components were the only factors to show statistically significant associations with GHQ-12 scores. However, these factors also showed little variation at postcode levels, suggesting a stronger individual determination. We conclude that our results provide some evidence in support of an association between mental health (GHQ-12 scores) and perceptions of social capital, but less support for the contextual nature of social capital.

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Dependency denied: health inequalities in the neo-liberal era.

Marian Peacock, Paul Bissell, Jenny Owen (2014)

The ways in which inequality generates particular population health outcomes remains a major source of dispute within social epidemiology and medical sociology. Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level (2009), undoubtedly galvanised thinking across the disciplines, with its emphasis on how income inequality shapes the distribution of health and social problems. In this paper, we argue that their focus on income inequality, whilst important, understates the role of neoliberal discourses and practises in making sense of contemporary inequality and its health-related consequences. Many quantitative studies have demonstrated that more neoliberal countries have poorer health compared to less neoliberal countries, but there are few qualitative studies which explore how neoliberal discourses shape accounts and experiences and what protections and resources might be available to people. This article uses findings from a qualitative psycho-social study employing biographical-narrative interviews with women in Salford (England) to understand experiences of inequality as posited in The Spirit Level. We found evidence for the sorts of damages resulting from inequality as proposed in The Spirit Level. However, in addition to these, the most striking finding was the repeated articulation of a discourse which we have termed "no legitimate dependency". This was something both painful and damaging, where dependency of almost any sort was disavowed and responsibility was assumed by the self or "othered" in various ways. No legitimate dependency, we propose, is a partial (and problematic) internalisation of neoliberal discourses which becomes naturalised and unquestioned at the individual level. We speculate that these sorts of discourses in conjunction with a destruction of protective resources (both material and discursive), lead to an increase in strain and account in part for well-known damages consequent on life in an unequal society. We conclude that integrating understandings of neoliberalism into theorising about inequality enriches sociological perspectives in this area.

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Swimming upstream? Taking action on the social determinants of health inequalities.

Margaret Whitehead, Jennie Popay (2010)

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Author and article information

Contributors

S. Moffatt: Role: Senior Lecturer

S. Lawson: Role: Research Assistant

R. Patterson: Role: Research Assistant

E. Holding: Role: Research Assistant

A. Dennison: Role: Research Assistant

S. Sowden: Role: Academic Clinical Lecturer

J. Brown: Role: Public Health Specialty Registrar

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Public Health (Oxf)

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Public Health (Oxf)

Journal ID (publisher-id): pubmed

Journal ID (hwp): jphm

Title: Journal of Public Health (Oxford, England)

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISSN (Print): 1741-3842

ISSN (Electronic): 1741-3850

Publication date (Print): June 2016

Publication date (Electronic): 15 March 2015

Publication date PMC-release: 15 March 2015

Volume: 38

Issue: 2

Pages: 197-205

Affiliations

[1 ]Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University , Baddiley-Clark Building, Richardson Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 4AX, UK

[2 ]Public Health Department, Gateshead Council , Gateshead, Tyne & Wear NE10 8QH, UK

Author notes

Address correspondence to S. Moffatt, E-mail: suzanne.moffatt@ 123456ncl.ac.uk

Article

Publisher ID: fdv031

DOI: 10.1093/pubmed/fdv031

PMC ID: 4894481

PubMed ID: 25774056

SO-VID: 62ba1aee-cbd2-4e3e-a04a-35defde9e59d

License:

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

History

Funding

Funded by: Newcastle City Council, Newcastle University's Public Engagement Fund

A qualitative study of the impact of the UK ‘bedroom tax’

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Abstract

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

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Special series on COVID-19 and Mental Health

Most cited references 5

Perceptions of social capital and the built environment and mental health.

Dependency denied: health inequalities in the neo-liberal era.

Swimming upstream? Taking action on the social determinants of health inequalities.

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