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Council defines when a bedroom is a boxroom
I’m no lawyer but it seems to me that the author of that article has built an enormous house of cards based on a very simply expressed decision by one Council - & that a decision which may well be open to question anyway. After all, if a room of less than 50 sq. ft. is in fact in use as a bedroom I don’t see why it should be defined as something else. It follows, in my view, that if you have 2 families living in identical houses both with a bedroom under 50 sq ft but one of them using it as a bedroom and other not then it should be called a bedroom in both cases.
The guy has been blogging relentlessly for weeks about the bedroom tax and a lot of it isn’t helpful at all in my opinion. He seems to me to be out of his depth on the legal nitty gritty. Just because Bristol Council has decided to adopt a de minimis threshold when deciding whether a space can properly be described as a bedroom, it doesn’t mean that every authority that hasn’t done something similar is acting unlawfully. The sheer scale of the task has meant that most authorities have gone with the landlord’s description in their first instance decisions and have not investigated the dimensions or other domestic arrangements ... I don’t think that is necessarily unlawful as an approach: claimants can appeal if they do not consider that they have something that could reasonably be described as a spare bedroom.
He does make a fair point in some of his posts that a lot of Councils seem to be hiding behind Circular A4/2012 and insisting that the landlord’s description of the property size is binding on the LA and carries no right of appeal. From the letters he has posted on the blog this does seem to be the line that many Councils have taken. He is quite right to say that the number of bedrooms is a question of fact in each case to be determined by the HB decision maker and there is a right to appeal because obviously the Tribunal may have a different view about the number of bedrooms for any number of reasons: room is too small to be a bedroom, room has some other use which precludes it from being a bedroom etc