Liam Byrne chose an interesting line of attack at a very testy Work and Pensions Questions today. The whole session had been rather like a mounting pile of passive aggressive notes on a fridge, with ministers rising to answer questions by saying ‘I’m glad the honourable member has asked me about such and such a policy because it gives me the opportunity to cite new figures showing we’re doing very well and that the last Labour government made a terrible mess of everything’. Byrne decided to raise the underoccupancy cut/’bedroom tax’/’spare room subsidy’ as his topical question. Here is the exchange:
Liam Byrne: I wonder if the Secretary of State will tell the House whether he thinks the bedroom tax is proving a runaway success?
Iain Duncan Smith: It is proving a success because what it’s doing is finally drawing a light onto the failure of the last government to sort out the mess that was in social housing, a housing benefit bill that doubled in ten years, set to rise by another £5billion, and after all I never hear from him or anybody on the other side about their failure because they left so many people, a quarter of a million in overcrowded accommodation, a waiting list that had grown to 1.5million
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