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Bedroom tax JR given permission to proceed
Housingnews.co.uk reports that a bedroom tax JR has been given permission to proceed with the hearing to be at the beginning of May.
Ugo Hayter from lawyers Leigh Day said -
‘This is an excellent result and the first step in over ruling what we believe is an unfair piece of legislation which has disproportionate negative consequences on disabled people and is therefore discriminatory.
We urge the Government to think again and not to punish the most vulnerable for what are negligible savings, the Court has ordered an urgent hearing at the beginning of May, we hope that this will mean that the terrible anxiety our clients and many others are currently facing will be short-lived.’
http://www.housingnews.co.uk/index.asp?PortalID=&cat=NEWS#436645
The link is not the right one for the article Ros, although the article on that page about the effect of bedroom tax on HA’s and the court’s approach to repossession is interesting and worth flagging up.
The article from which you quote was in yesterday’s news, here:
http://www.housingnews.co.uk/index.asp?PortalID=&cat=news&period=thisweek#436454
It’s a good article with interesting examples, and the one further down about mass appeals is interesting also. Has anyone come across any advice advocating such an approach? Surely a terrible idea…
In Reading some appellants are already waiting up to 9 months for appeals to be listed, so further clogging up the system by ‘protest’ appeals can only be bad. It might also encourage the goverment to further curtail appeal rights.
Re the latter point I think it may be unfair to characterise the appeals being encouraged as purely ‘protest’ appeals with no prospect of success. Whilst at present the appeals do not appear to have a chance of success under the law as it is, as the GLC have pointed out there are a number of ongoing legal challenges to various aspects of the policy, and if any of these challenges are successful people will only have protected their retrospective rights if they have already lodged appeals.
From a practical point of view I don’t think that there is much risk of the system becoming clogged, at least in terms of listings. I would imagine that appeals that match up with ongoing challenges will be stayed pending the outcome of those challenges and then only listed subsequently when there are disputes of fact. I would think that ‘speculative’ appeals that do not have any merit or association with higher level challenges will be able to be dismissed on the papers