Candidates for down-sizing

It allows councils to punish families, many of whom will be existing from day to day due to a string of cuts that are the most savage ever imposed by a Western democratic government.

Councils will be allowed to impose a financial fine on any family that does not give up spare bedrooms. Now Rotherham Council intends to do the same but with much less restrictive terms - starting when children have left and on tenancies with four or more bedrooms.

Logically speaking the policy is sensible, socially and emotionally it is savage. The Council is asking tenants to vacate a house in which they have lived for many years, brought up a family and seen their children marry and some of them die.

Logically speaking, of course, it would be sensible to suggest that owner occupiers who children have left home and who have empty bedrooms do the same. Some owner occupiers who children have left home do downsize, some move into local authority bungalows and flats but most, hopefully, purchase a smaller dwelling.

Logically speaking, such owner occupiers could be penalised in the same way as council tenants if they don't move by, for example, having a higher rate of council tax imposed on them. But a more convivial method might be to offer them a bribe in the same way that offers of money have been suggested to coerce council tenants out of their homes.

It is a policy that Cameron would not dare voice since most home owners are Tory voters, in some ways it is a pity council house tenants aren't. If they were the Spare Bedroom policy would never have been put on paper. It might be that some of the Rotherham councillors and officials engaged in putting this 'Children gone, tenant out' policy together are themselves owners of houses that have one or more spare bedrooms and would be delighted to help ease the housing shortage by downsizing.

Councillors and those readers in favour of the policy need to remember why council houses with three or more bedrooms were built. They were built at a time when large families were welcomed. They were needed to provide the fodder for an economy that needed workers. Today those families that provided the workers are no longer wanted.

A Pearman