The bedroom tax has always been the Achilles Heel of the Coalition's politically near-impregnable welfare reform agenda, and Friday's Affordable Homes bill defeat in the Commons practically guarantees that it will continue to discomfort ministers right through to the general election.
It remains to be seen whether the private member's bill piloted by Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George will make it through to the statute book, but the vote means that the bill will now proceed to committee stage for further scrutiny, and potentially on to the Lords, keeping the issue high on the agenda for the next few months.
The bill itself does not scrap the bedroom tax but dilutes its impact, proposing three major exemptions: disabled tenants whose social home have been specially adapted; disabled tenants in receipt of disability living allowance who are unable to share a bedroom; and under-occupying tenants who have not received an alternative offer of accommodation from their landlord.
The vote also crystallised widening political divisions within the Coalition in the run up to the general election. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, who had voted for the bedroom tax two years ago, tweeted on Friday that he was:
Absolutely delighted that the bill… to fix the Tories' bedroom tax has passed thanks to Lib Dem and Labour MPs
The bedroom tax has always proved politically controversial. It caused the first sign of trouble for ministers' welfare strategy in December 2011 when the government was defeated in the Lords early on in the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. Then, 13 Liberal Democrat peers (and one Tory, the late Lord Newton) voted to throw out the policy. Not a single cross-bencher supported it.
The government subsequently rescued the policy in the Commons, but its unpopularity has persistently forced the Coalition onto the back foot. Early on it crucially lost naming rights for this most high profile of policies: only ministers and civil servants, with arcane fastidiousness, still call the bedroom tax the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy.
Unlike the benefit cap, which seemed to crystallise wider perceptions of fairness in relation to the welfare state, the public has never been convinced the bedroom tax is just. Pollsters have consistently found it uniquely unpopular among welfare reforms, especially among Labour and UKIP voters, sometimes by a clear majority.
So unpopular that Labour, which has been cautious in its opposition to Coalition welfare reform, felt able to announce a year ago it would scrap the bedroom tax if it were elected. Lib Liberal Democrat activists voted to review it at their conference in 2013. Even independent-minded Tory MPs have admitted to second thoughts, including Anne McIntosh, Nadine Dorries, and recently, UKIP defector Douglas Carswell.
Grim tales of bedroom tax misery and despair meanwhile have piled up: disabled tenants forced to move out of homes which had been expensively adapted at taxpayer expense; parents receiving bedroom tax demands for the bedroom vacated by their dead child; once sought-after family homes lying empty because no-one wants to risk bcoming subject to the bedroom tax; estranged fathers unable to afford the charge for the spare bedroom where their visiting children stayed at weekends.
The UN housing envoy Raquel Rolnik notoriously made the bedroom tax the focus of her review of Britain's housing last Autumn, saying she had been disturbed how the policy had heavily affected
the most vulnerable, the most fragile, the people who are on the fringes of coping with everyday life
She called it to be scrapped, much to the government's fury.
Perhaps most embarrassingly, Department for Work and Pensions' own analysis of the policy published in July showed that it was not working well: a lack of alternative accommodation meant only 4.5% of tenants had been able to move to a smaller home, forcing thousands into dire "heat or eat" financial hardship and debt. That report would give the Lib Dems the wriggle room to propose bedroom tax reform.
Although ministers originally claimed the bedroom tax - which deducts housing benefit of between £11 and £21 a week from tenants deemed to occupy more bedrooms than they need - would save £500m, by last November it had quietly revised this figure down to £400m. Councils and housing associations say that by the time the costs of evictions, arrears and debt advice are factored in, the policy will save nothing.
For many it has become a byword for bad policy. As Labour's shadow minister for welfare reform Chris Bryant said in Friday's debate:
Some Government policies introduced since 2010 have been incompetent, and others, I believe, have been unfair, but this one manages to combine unfairness and incompetence to a phenomenal degree—quite a feat
