The Morals of Charging the Taxpayer for a Spare Room
How can you justify calling a spare room at your sister’s house your main residence, when you own a three bedroom house elsewhere and your husband and children live there full time. The house in question is in Ms Jacqui Smith’s constituency and I am absolutely certain that, should she lose her seat at the next election (oh, please!), she will be found living there full-time. It is not even an issue of how many nights she spends there. I am considering taking a job the other side of the country from where I live. I would not consider uprooting my family from a community where they are happy and relatively safe, so will have to find a bedsit. If I’m lucky, I may be able to get home for weekends, but I may be forced to see my family only during school holidays. I won’t consider my main home to be a single room in a shared house, it will be where my wife and children are. I won’t be able to claim the cost of the bedsit or the travel to my main home on expenses and I won’t even be able to claim the tax back.
How can any decent, moral individual regard a spare room as their home and the place where their family lives as “just some place I visit a few days a week”, unless there is an ulterior motive? Through this blatant, cynical exploitation of the rules, Ms Smith has pocketed around £116,000 over the last 11 years. The additional expense incurred by her can only be the rental value of a single room in her sister’s house, but why should she be able to claim this from the taxpayer. If you are claiming benefits and wish to claim Housing Benefit to cover the cost of rent, the rental value of your accommodation will be assessed before any award is made and no award will be made if the property you are renting belongs to a family member. Did Ms Smith’s sister really charge her more than £10,000 per year to sleep in her spare room three or four times a week? How will Ms Smith face a constituent trying to feed their family and keep up payments on a mortgage with a total income of little more than she gets from this ruse due to redundancy or reduced working hours?
What Ms Smith has done may be within the letter of the regulations and she may well have discussed the details of her claim with the relevant Parliamentary authorities. This only goes to show that the system is as cynical and exploitative as Ms Smith’s decision to maximise her drain on the public purse. Why hasn’t the noise from the Opposition over this issue been deafening? Could it be that similar stories of exploitation from within their ranks are waiting exposure? It is the system that allows, even promotes, this style of leadership. What we need is a change in governance not a change in Government!
