The under-occupancy penalty more commonly known as the bedroom tax is a policy whose roots lie in London. Rents in the UK capital are so extortionate that keeping a roof over the heads of the unemployed, low-paid, disabled and vulnerable has become a dreadful burden on the taxes of City bankers, in the few cases where they pay any.

Readers might be forgiven for imagining, then, that the savage benefit reductions would be punishing Londoners harder than people in other regions of the UK. We’ve just been crunching the numbers, and you might be a little surprised at who it turns out are actually bearing the brunt more than most.

We took the detailed government stats revealed by Inside Housing last month, and referenced them against the listed populations of the UK’s “NUTS” regions used in the figures (for some reason N. Ireland was excluded). We then factored in the average UK household size to get a ballpark estimate for the number of people affected.

These were the resulting rankings, with the areas MOST affected at the top.

1. North-East England: 1 person in 29

2. Scotland: 1 in 30

3. North-West England: 1 in 37

4. Wales: 1 in 40

5. Yorkshire and the Humber: 1 in 45

6. West Midlands: 1 in 47

7. East Midlands: 1 in 55

8. Greater London: 1 in 65

9. East of England: 1 in 75

10: South-West England: 1 in 84

11: South-East England: 1 in 101



Now there’s an odd thing. Proportionately, the regions being hit the hardest are those furthest from London. More money is being clawed back from Scotland, Wales and North-East and North-West England than from the capital, and the further south you go the lesser the effects. Which is weird, because it’s almost exactly the opposite pattern to the level of rents.

We’re not exactly sure why this should be the case. It may be partly that because rents in London ARE so high, people are crammed into house-shares and so fewer of them had “spare” rooms to start with. But we suspect it might also not be entirely unrelated to a disturbing graph published this month by the Guardian:

The majority of the poor are now people in work, not the unemployed. And a vastly disproportionate share of all UK wages are now paid in and around London. Which suggests that Londoners are better able to afford even their sky-high rents, and as a result get proportionately less housing benefit.

The net effect of the bedroom tax, then, is to suck even more money away from the “edges” of the country and into the London coffers of the Treasury, where in turn it gets disproportionately invested straight back into London, generating more wages and completing the circle.

Vince Cable today described London as “a giant suction machine draining the life out of the rest of the country”. That wasn’t exactly a new revelation. But we suspect few people realised that one of the engines driving that machine was the “spare room subsidy” being snatched from the poorest in Wales, the north of England and, as ever, the willing cash cow that is Scotland.

(Scottish Labour, alert readers won’t need reminding, want to accelerate this process even more by taking extra money out of the Holyrood budget to fill the bedroom-tax hole, encouraging the Tories to squeeze the poor still tighter.)

Cynical, inexcusably paranoid viewers could perhaps be forgiven for imagining that Westminster was frantically trying to extract every last penny it could from the Scots, via every conceivable route, while it still had the chance.