The decision of a tribunal in Fife is being reported as a major challenge to the bedroom tax: see, e.g., the Scotsman or the Express. The tribunal decided both that a dining room should not be treated as a bedroom, and, as I argued last March, that a room of 66 square foot should be disregarded as being too small for an adult.
The tribunal’s decision is welcome, but it’s not unequivocally supportive of the position I’ve been taking. I suggested that, as a matter of general principle, if a room was too small to be used by two children or one adult, it should not be counted as a bedroom for the purposes of an under-occupancy penalty (or ‘bedrooom tax’) which says that that’s what a bedroom is for. The tribunal actually says that every decision has to be made on a case by case basis, which sounds administratively unworkable.