Construction and Deconstruction of 'Family' by the ‘Bedroom Tax’

accepted version to appear in British Politics, 11 (4) (2016)

Anat Greenstein, Department of Professional Development and Educational Innovation, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, M15

Erica Burman, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL,

Afroditi Kalambouka, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL,

Kate Sapin,School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL,

Abstract:

This article explores how the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy policy, commonly known as the Bedroom Tax, works materially and discursively to create certain types of individuals and families as valued and deserving, while portraying others as excessive, wasteful or discretionary. The paper draws on a qualitative study project (Bragg et al., 2015) which generated accounts from 14 families impacted by the policy, as well as 39 interviews with key workers in local schools, charities and community organisations. Through analysis of official texts (such as the policy text and related debates in Parliament) and interview data, the paper explores how particular gendered understandings of care and kinship are constructed, regulated, penalised, and performed via the Bedroom Tax, and how these impact on the everyday lives of families subject to the subsidy removal, and beyond this also to their neighbours and neighbourhoods.

Keywords: Austerity, poverty, reponsibilisation, gender, family, education

Introduction

In this article we explore the impacts of the Coalition Government’s ‘Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy’ policy, commonly known as the ‘Bedroom Tax’, which came into action in April 2013 as part of the implementation of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and remains in force despite much controversy and agitation.[1] By 'impacts' we mean both the material and emotional effects of having housing benefits cut by an average sum of £10-25 per week, and the discursive creation of certain types of individuals and families as deserving and valued, against which ‘...classed Others are produced and symbolically shamed for not being austere enough’ (Jensen, 2012, p. 15).

The Bedroom Tax is just one of a series of welfare reforms and spending cuts that were introduced by the previous Conservative and Lib-Dem Coalition government, which are considered by many social researchers as a continuation of neo-liberal economic reforms. On the one hand, these have worked over the last 35 years to transform waged work, making a large sector of the labour market, and particularly low-paid work, precarious, fragile and often short-term (Bailey, 2016). At the same time, these policy reforms construct poverty as a question of individual responsibility (Grabham & Smith, 2010; Pantazis, 2016). Under the neo-liberal model currently dominating national economies, including even social democratic states, 'activation' reigns supreme; that is, the idea that the state needs to provide its citizens with welfare “from the cradle to the grave” is seen as producing dependency and laziness, and the role of the state is to encourage people to adopt entrepreneurial and opportunity-maximising behaviour (e.g. Bhattacharyya, 2013; Lister, 2006; 2011). This discursive turn 'explains' poverty as the result of reckless behaviour on the part of the poor, and aims to alleviate it by re-educating the poor out of state dependency and into ‘economic mobility’. The focus on economic mobility rather than inequality allows the structural changes to global markets to be ignored (Jensen & Tyler, 2012), transforming questions of unemployment into discussions about strategies to increase ‘employability’ or counter ‘worklessness’, seen as arising from intrinsic traits of the individual. Indeed, as Shildricket al (2010) argue, despite common conceptions that paid work is the only way out of poverty, it is precisely this cycle of precarious and temporary low paid employment followed by periods of unemployment that keeps people in poverty rather than lifts them out of it. Indeed, a recent study has found that working families with children have faced a growing risk of low income since 2008/9, and that the Bedroom Tax and other welfare cuts have particularly worsened the situation of social tenants (Padley & Hirsch, 2016).

Many feminists have critiqued this individualisation of poverty and explored its deeply gendered aspects (e.g. Lister 2006), while others also attend to its racialised aspects (Bhattacharyya, 2013) and unequal impacts on disabled people (e.g. Duffy, 2013; Power et al., 2014). Unwaged care and reproductive work, which is disproportionately carried out by women, is made invisible through rendering entitlement to many benefits conditional on actively seeking and gaining waged work and prioritising it over other commitments (Grabham & Smith, 2010), as well as by ignoring the increased demand for unpaid care caused by cuts to social and educational services (e.g. Surestart) and the need to “make do” and budget, which often requires emotional and material work (Abramovitz, 2012; Harrison, 2012).

The Bedroom Tax, as we will discuss later, works in combination with other welfare and spending cuts to pressure family budgets, and brings an increase in food poverty and other unmet basic needs, such as fuel and clothing, as well as relative deprivation in key areas (such as internet access for educational purposes or physical activities important for health), and puts extra strain on already pressurised informal networks of support (such as family and community organisations). Yet it is of particular interest to discussions of gendered aspects of austerity as, unlike many other welfare reforms, the Bedroom Tax does not merely seek to directly regulate claimants’ engagement in waged work, often considered in the ‘public’ sphere of production. While the reduction in benefits may indirectly encourage people to seek more income through paid work, its focus is instead on regulation of the ‘private’ sphere of home and family. In this sense, we will argue that not only does the Bedroom Tax incite further state surveillance of the domestic sphere (in the name of neoliberal responsibilisation), it also performs particular - and particularly gendered - acts of reification or fixing that extend that surveillance into symbolic violence that threatens some forms of family relations.

Our analysis in this paper draws on the official policy documents and parliamentary debates around them, as well as on materials collected in interviews with 14 families impacted by the Bedroom Tax, and 39 staff members from schools and community organisations. These interviews were conducted as part of a research project at the University of Manchester aimed at investigating how the changes in housing subsidies had affected children, their schools and other children’s services (see Bragg et al, 2015, for the full research report). In the first section of the paper we will look at the unique ways through which the policy constructs certain family ties and arrangements as legitimate and worthy of support, while according others the status of discretionary or supplementary relations that should only be available to those who can afford it. In the second section of the paper we discuss how the Bedroom Tax policy continues the neo-liberal trend, apparent in many other welfare reforms, of individualising poverty through discourses of choice and mobility and how this discourse works in embodied and gendered ways to pathologies people (and specifically women) in poverty.

The home and the family under the “Bedroom Tax”

Since the 1st of April 2013, working age social tenants in receipt of Housing Benefit experience a reduction in their benefit entitlement if they live in housing that is deemed to be too large for their needs.Housing benefits are reduced by 14% for one ‘spare bedroom’ and 25% for two or more ‘spare bedrooms’, meaning that tenants impacted by the tax currently lose on average £14.92 of their housing payments per week (Wilson and McInnes, 2014). The policy allocates one bedroom for

- adult couples

- single adults over 16 years old

- two children of the same gender up to age 15

- two children of either gender up to age 9

- an overnight carer (where required).[2][PK1][AG2]

As discussed earlier, the material impacts of this policy are largely similar (and added to) to those of other welfare cuts. However, it is unique in its explicit definitions of the spaces to which a family is entitled. It is worth noting here that this unique intrusion of the policy into what is seen as the private sphere is reflected in the dubbing of the policy in media and public discourse as “The Bedroom Tax”, instead of the official terms such as ‘Removal of the Spare-Room Subsidy’[PK3], ‘Social Sector Size Criteria’, or ’Under-occupation Deduction’. This name change points to the popular perception of the policy as a tax rather than a removal of subsidy, and the word bedroom implies the focus on intimate relations and sleeping arrangements. Through defining the family home, the Bedroom Tax works to construct the kind of family forms and ties that may be considered essential, and those that are seen as discretionary, supplementary or even luxuries and thus should be available only to those who can afford them.

The definition of family household on offer through these room allocation criteria is of a bi-generational network of relations, which (as we will go onto discuss) is a particularly restrictive and reductive model. The policy accords the categories of age and gender discursive priority, or what might be called 'master status'. Age and gender are considered sufficient for determining room allocation, taking no account of the size of the room, or of possible different relationships or needs of its occupants. As with other welfare 'benefits', preferences and privacy are not matters to which the poor are entitled. Examples of situations that were described by parents as untenable included families where bigger age gaps between two children meant that a younger child might be going to bed whilst the other wanted to have friends over, do homework or read:

How can they possibly revise when they've got a two year old running in? You can't keep a two year old still for very long. .... I know they don't revise every single night for SATs, but they do need to do some work in private, but if you've got younger children running around, it's difficult (Interview, Manager of a housing association)

A lot of our families are four or five children, so at that point they’ve got two older children in one room, two younger children in another and they’re actually unable to get them to go to sleep easily cos there may be bigger age differences, the younger ones having to go to bed first, the older one is supposed to be waiting up but then the younger one will get disturbed when the older one goes to bed and all of these things are having an impact on children’s learning, then, within school(Interview, Inclusion Manager, Primary school 03[PK4][AG5])

Age is, by definition, a transient characteristic - a matter that is globally used to exclude or marginalise children and even (in the case of paid labour) exploit them more (by using age as a justification for paying children and young people less (Lavalette, 2000)). Our participants showed creative engagement with this characteristic in their deliberations and negotiations with the Bedroom Tax. This included some deciding to find ways to pay the tax for a year or so, on the grounds that the children would then become eligible to have separate rooms.

Further, the room allocation regulations ignore the ongoing intergenerational family relations and support between parents and their adult offspring. Many of our participants discussed how rooms that were defined by the policy as ‘spare’ were actually being used by adult offspring living away from the family home, or by grandchildren visiting. At a conceptual level, the Bedroom Tax can be seen to deploy a chronological rather than biographical or generational definition of childhood, by assuming that one ceases to be a child at 18 years. At a practical level, this is particularly worrying when we think about the wider neoliberal policy discourse and intergenerational poverty as well as the problems of the mental and physical wellbeing of an ageing population. As one of our respondents puts it:

I told them ‘my children come home and be with their family, where do you want them to sleep?’ well, either move house ...well, if I move house where they are supposed to sleep? ‘Well, we don’t even have an answer to that, or, you know…’ I think they are more or less saying to me they can sleep on the sofa or buy a blow-up bed or anything, it’s like …‘No, this is their home’ I said to them ‘with all due respect I pushed my children to be educated for their future', you know, I could be in that situation that you know, it doesn’t matter, they can stay at home and do nothing with their lives, so I said, ‘basically, you [are] penalising people that are trying to teach the children the right thing to get good education you know, so they can take care of themselves in the future … you basically put me in this situation where if I am gonna move house, 1. It’s going to affect my daughter where she is going to college now, and then, 2. After that, my children wouldn’t want to come home because there is no room for them anymore”(Interview, Elena, mother of 6)

This restrictive view of family ties as ending at the age of 18, or [AG6] when offspring cease to live with their parents (which is often problematically assumed to happen at the age of 18), places families at the heart of contradictory policy demands. As we will discuss later, on the one hand the Government demands that poor people should increase their mobility and entrepreneurial behaviour by moving further afield to look for work, education and housing opportunities (DWP, Impact Assessment, 16 February, 2012). Yet on the other hand the same government issues a policy which denies the care and reproductive labour needed to enable such mobility, as well as the emotional security of having a home to go back to, by deeming bedrooms which are used by adult offspring regularly living away from home as ‘spare’.

Similarly, some of our respondents described using the ‘spare’ bedroom to have their grandchildren over, thus supporting the children’s parents in working and resting. Feminists have discussed how these informal networks of support, which are called for by policy discourse emphasising resilience and condemning ‘dependence’, draw on the unpaid labour and resources of women (Harrison, 2012). Yet, in the case of the Bedroom Tax, this kind of informal labour and resources is not only unpaid but is actually penalised through benefit reduction over ‘spare bedrooms’.

Thus, through the room allocation criteria, the Bedroom Tax policy works to construct and reify ‘age-appropriate’ family relationships (as well as inscribing normative binaries of childhood vs. adulthood, see Slater, 2015) which presents and prescribes a narrow view of what a family is that stands in contrast to the diversity and multiplicity of forms enacted in people’s daily lives.

By contrast, the policy figures gender as a constant. The focus on gender as the difference that makes a difference, one of only two categories that influence room allocation, works to reify it as rigid dichotomy which is portrayed as universal and (unlike age) fixed. Thus rather than being a complex, contested and relationally elaborated category (a claim that would be supported by parties as diverse as traditional developmental psychology right through to queer theory - cfMaccoby, 1988; Butler, 1990), gender is presumed to be a unitary and stable constant, albeit that it seems to acquire this importance only at the arbitrary age of 10 years. While child protection concerns probably informed this specification, along with an assumed consensus about the acceleration in ever younger ages of puberty noted globally but especially in (over)developed societies (which needs critical interrogation, see Roberts, 2013), this designation seems to fly in the face of other prevalent concerns around early sexualisation of young people. But, beyond this, we want to highlight how this bureaucratic apparatus that governs entitlement to space and regulates activity within the home thereby imports particular sets of assumptions that inevitably - given the sex/gender complex (Butler, 1990) - proliferate from age and gender to assumptions about sexuality. It is a developmentalist model of the kind belied by Freudian and Foucaultian analyses, although it also flouts everything that developmental psychologists claim about gender development (as installed, if not consolidated, by the earliest months - if not years (e.g. Shirley & Campbell, 2000). Along with this, the heterosexual matrix is physically legislated for by the layout of the family sleeping arrangements: the presumed asexual, ungendered child thus acquires through mere time some new status that qualifies it to become a 'he' or 'she,' and then by age 10 'they' must sleep in rooms with those 'like' them, or away from those who are 'different'. Hence it is impossible not to mention how even (or perhaps especially) in the domestic domain, one that is, according to all major theorists of the twentieth century (including Freud and Levi Strauss) by definition structured around the incest taboo (in theory if not practice), tdhe attribution of gender thus presumes heterosexuality and therefore installs heteronormativity in both adult-child and child-child relations (even if, or as, the gender/sexual orientations of the cohabiting parents remains unspecified).