Talk:Bedroom tax

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Bedroom tax article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Law

	Law portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.LawWikipedia:WikiProject LawTemplate:WikiProject Lawlaw articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

United Kingdom Mid‑importance

	United Kingdom portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject United Kingdom, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the United Kingdom on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.United KingdomWikipedia:WikiProject United KingdomTemplate:WikiProject United KingdomUnited Kingdom articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Neutrality

This appears to be a POV fork of the bill article. I've neutralised the section name and consolidated. This also risks WP:NOT#NEWS. Widefox; talk 21:21, 11 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you can think of anything positive about this policy feel free to add. The only things I can think of is a) it has saved some money though less that the govt predicted b) some have moved though not many Ulcerspar12 (talk) 15:21, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:POVFORK and WP:CSECTION. It is not up to you or I to decide what to say, but to balance what the reliable sources say per WP:NPOV. As this topic has merits I decided not to take to deletion, but it must be balanced else I would be in favour of deletion. Widefox; talk 15:34, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well obviously I would expect contributions based on actual sources rather than what you or I or anyone else “reckon” .I was merely welcoming you to contribute rather than drive-by tagging and threatening deletion! There is a decent briefing note here if you are so inclined www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn06272.pdf‎

Ulcerspar12 (talk) 16:10, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks but I mainly work on dabs, and when I have time computing. I patrolled it, so this is my duty per that. I often drive-by tag as I'm working on dabs and don't edit the articles. I see that as a plus in terms of consistency. I would expect other editors to have input on a new articles, especially one so critical. Coming back, the parent law article isn't too large, so as is, I'd be in favour of merging. I'll refrain from tagging, but I encourage others to. Widefox; talk 20:20, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the POV tag - happy to remove as several views are now expressed. Note that this is a bit of a WP:CFORK / WP:COATRACK for opinions (WP:NOT#NEWS and WP:SPINOUT) about the parent topic Welfare Reform Act 2012, I will defer merge topic to others. Widefox; talk 10:10, 15 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bedroom tax

This should be moved to Bedroom tax, as this is the common name? MRSC (talk) 20:04, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree; AFAIK, "bedroom tax" is a pejorative term used by opponents. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.183.129.20 (talk) 20:48, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Lead photo

I question whether there should be a photo of identifiable houses in this article. As well as naming the housing estate, the photo "details" page has the exact GPS location . I propose that this photo should be removed, or the identifying information should be deleted if that is possible.86.183.129.20 (talk) 20:50, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say remove but based on a different rationale. The houses in question may not be liable for the bedroom tax. The occupants could have taken up right-to-buy yesterday. Ulcerspar12 (talk) 10:55, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(OP) Exactly. Thanks for doing the edit. 109.145.19.122 (talk) 13:26, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Refugees in spare bedrooms

Removed as appears to be completely made up statement. The only news article on the subject was saying the government did NOT intend to do this. 194.75.171.106 (talk) 13:09, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Bedroom allowance

Under "Policy", it is stated that one bedroom is allowed for

Adult children (sic) who are in the armed forces
A bedroom required by an approved foster carer for a fostered child.

I'm not sure what "adult children" are, so I checked the reference quoted for that section ("Under Occupancy (bedroom tax) Charges". Trafford.gov.uk), and

I found no reference to "adult children" or the Armed Forces. I plan to delete that entry soon, unless someone brings to my attention any information to back it up that I may have missed.
I found that the source explicitly states the opposite regarding foster children (under section "What about foster carers?"), so I'm removing that immediately.

TastyChikan (talk) 00:42, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The point on "adult children in the Armed Forces" has now also been removed.

TastyChikan (talk) 09:00, 15 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Bias

There seem to be some bias towards the policy in the article, such as "questions have been raised why it took them until now before they did this" (who is saying this?) and "in essence, right-leaning individuals were more likely to be too busy doing other things than answering polling questions" - the article quoted actually says "easy-to-reach voters are less Conservative than the “busy” respondents the pollsters have to work hard to chase", which along with stating the inverse ("voters that are easy to reach are less likely to vote for Conservatives" is not the same as "voters that are harder to reach are more likely to vote Conservative") is far less accusatory in tone. Fohfuu (talk) 15:40, 12 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think those are good points. I've flagged the "questions have been raised" part; if no references are found soon, I would be in favour of removing the sentence altogether.

As for the polling question, although I don't really see why the current phrasing is accusatory in tone, I do agree that it should be edited to reflect the source more closely. After looking at the details in the source (Guardian - General election opinion poll failure down to not reaching Tory voters) , I suggest

using Conservative instead of right-leaning (which is not used by the source)
removing everything after "in essence" (i.e., the "busy-voters" point) because that's actually only one of the three points of error mentioned in the source. We could add all three of them as bullet points or something like that, but since the polling error is not the main topic of the Wikipedia article (or even that section), I think it's sufficient to summarise as "not enough Conservative voters in the sample", which I think is achieved by the statement before the "in essence" sentence.

TastyChikan (talk) 07:11, 13 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This is a comment on Daoipal1930s's (talk) edit: as far as public opinion on the topic is relevant (which can be debated), the accuracy of those polls is also relevant. The section could, indeed, be improved as discussed above, so I will restore the deleted part and make the adjustments discussed above. If you believe it should be completely removed, please explain your reasoning here.

TastyChikan (talk) 16:59, 28 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The subject of the article is the Under Occupancy Penalty, not polling accuracy. The linked source does not mention the Under Occupancy Penalty at all and is not remotely relevant to it. Irrelevant material intended only to cast doubt on an article's source unambiguously does not belong on Wikipedia. See WP:SYNTH Dtellett (talk) 20:00, 28 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the same spirit, the subject of the article is Under-occupancy penalty, not the results of polls conducted by privately-owned market-research companies. I would not object in completely removing the section, but if we're keeping the poll results, we should keep the comment on the accuracy. True, the Guardian article doesn't specifically mention the under-occupancy penalty polls, but it does say the polling companies in question have consistently been using biased samples, which sounds more than remotely relevant.

As an analogy, imagine if an article on semiconductors or superconductivity included a claim backed by a reference to a paper by Jan Hendrik Schoen; I would find it very relevant to mention that a subsequent misconduct investigation by Bell Labs concluded that Schoen used fraudulent data on most of his papers, which led to him being discredited in academia. Would it matter if the specific reference paper/claim was mentioned or not in the investigation report? Would this be considered original research on Wikipedia?

So we either remove the section altogether or leave it in with the note on the accuracy. Keeping just a claim and leaving out a very serious question of its validity is textbook bias, and this is what doesn't belong on Wikipedia.

TastyChikan (talk) 23:37, 28 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 8 April 2019

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 02:26, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Under-occupancy penalty → Bedroom tax – per WP:COMMONNAME – "Under-occupancy penalty" is an official name (various alternative wording is used), but "bedroom tax" gives over 10 times as many hits in the search engines and on the BBC news site. It's used by the media, charities, housing associations, quangos, local councils... Just about the only organisation that doesn't use the term "bedroom tax" is HM Government. Rapido (talk) 20:23, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Support per common name shown by the overwhelming use of the term on the page itself. And per page references, which show a preference for the common name. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:50, 9 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Support per above. Thryduulf (talk) 12:53, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Updates Needed?

The Reaction section talks at length about how one side of the aisle believed that it would actually cost money in the long run and how proponents thought it would save money and be good for everyone, and it talks about it as though it's still early on and we are still awaiting to see what those effects may be.

Well, it's been nearly ten years. Does anyone know how that panned out or did No One in academia, government, or the private sector make any attempt to assess the impact of a deeply controversial law once it was out of the papers? I don't know, and I'm probably not the one to write that section, but there has to be something.

I want to add the Template:Update to the page but thought I'd mention it on the talk page first to see how others feel. Autotechnica (talk) 23:33, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

TBH the term "Bedroom tax" has dropped completely out of public discourse. The 2019 move was ill-advised for that reason. Simply no-one talks about it anymore. FOARP (talk) 13:01, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]