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It is almost five years to the day since Bedroom Tax letters began dropping through letterboxes, and Jayson and Charlotte Carmichael got one informing them to find £11.90 a week extra towards the cost of their two-bedroom flat.

This was the first they had heard of the ‘Spare Room Subsidy’ – a vicious austerity cut then due to start in April 2013.

Charlotte, 45, sleeps in a bed specially designed to ease agonising sores caused by her spina bifida. It takes up a lot of space – meaning Jayson sleeps in the other bedroom.

Even so, the couple were deemed to be ‘under-occupying’ their modest housing association flat.

(Image: Daily Mirror) (Image: Daily Mirror)

On Tuesday, five years later, in a bitter anniversary of the moment the hated policy began to wreak its human misery, the Carmichaels – who have already fought the DWP in almost every court in the land and won in the Supreme Court – faced new proceedings at the Court of Appeal, in the Tories’ latest attack on the disabled.

Thanks to previous court rulings, the Carmichaels are no longer paying the bedroom tax.

But now Secretary of State Esther McVey wants to stop the lower tribunal courts being able to use the Human Rights Act to challenge the Government. This is her department’s second attempt.

(Image: REX/Shutterstock)

“This fight is no longer about us and the bedroom tax,” Jayson, 55, a former hotel worker, says. “It’s become a fight for other people.”

The couple have previously called their years of legal battles “absolute hell” and say this has made “our nightmares return”.

It’s hard to convey how sad it is that for five years the Carmichaels have had to fight on and on against the Government over £11.90 a week and the right for Jayson to sleep in a tiny bedroom in a cramped flat in Southport from which they have been unable to move.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

It’s also hard to convey quite how sinister the Court of Appeal’s judgement could be for anyone who wants to challenge government welfare cuts.

In effect, the Government is trying to shut down legal routes to fighting welfare reform, by dragging disabled and unemployed people to fight them in the most expensive courts in the land. And any ruling would also be likely to affect employment and immigration tribunals.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

As the Carmichaels’ solicitor Lucy Cadd explains, this is yet “another example of the Government seeking to undermine disabled people and social welfare claimants”.

She adds that “the case is constitutionally important with far-reaching implications”. Now, someone like Jayson who believes a new law is discriminatory doesn’t have to go to the High Court.

He or she can fight to have it overturned in the social security tribunal using the Human Rights Act.

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“The tribunal system is helpful as people don’t have to have a lawyer, and they wouldn’t become liable for the Secretary of State’s costs if they weren’t successful,” Cadd, of Leigh Day solicitors says.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

“If the Government are successful against Jayson and Charlotte, the social security tribunal would have to enforce the new regulations even if discriminatory.

"The only avenue would be to claim damages against the Secretary of State after the particular regulations had been deemed unlawful by judicial review”.

In the Carmichaels’ case, changing the regulations took a four-year court battle, whereas the lower courts ruled in their favour much earlier. Not only would they have had to bring an expensive damages claim to win, but they’d have been liable for the Secretary of State’s legal costs if they lost.

And the extra twist to this is that you can only bring a damages claim “proportionate to the legal costs” – £11.90 is everything to Jayson and Charlotte, but would the court agree?

The DWP said it would be inappropriate to comment on the case before the court’s decision is known.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Jayson and Charlotte were not at Court 3 to hear the case against them this week as her condition had flared up again “most likely because of the stress of the case”, Jayson said.

Esther McVey wasn’t there either, but it seemed strangely appropriate she was the named Secretary of State, as if things have come full circle in five years.

When the Carmichaels first got their letter, McVey was the Minister for the Disabled presiding over Iain Duncan Smith’s spectacular cuts to disabled people’s support.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Of course, now, as the fifth anniversary of a ‘reform’ that has led to untold poverty and distress approaches, she could just do as Labour has pledged and cancel the bedroom tax.

“As the Carmichaels’ case shows, the ‘bedroom tax’ is a blunt instrument that simply isn’t working,” Shelter’s chief executive Polly Neate says. “The Government needs to abolish it, once and for all.”

In the meantime, the Carmichaels, and anyone else who wants to challenge the Government, await the judgement of the Court of Appeal.