How the bedroom tax is bringing despair to a Tory heartlands village...
"Memories - happy and sad - suffuse the modest, neatly decorated three-bedroom house that Jean Baxter has lived in for 35 years. Treasured pictures of her children and grandchildren smile down from the walls. From her bedroom window, she can see the gravestone of her baby daughter, who died soon after being after being born, not long after they moved in.
Baxter, 60, has lived in the rural Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine all her life. Her children and their families live locally. Baxter provides childcare, often at unsocial hours, for one of her daughters, a nurse and single mum with four children under the age of seven. But this carefully nurtured, close-knit network of mutual support, however, is rapidly unravelling.
A year ago, Baxter learned she would be affected by the bedroom tax. Since then, she has been preparing, reluctantly, to move. She's sold furniture, and packed many of her belongings into plastic containers as she anxiously waits. "It's my home, I can't imagine not living here," says Baxter. "Obviously at some point I knew I would be moving to somewhere smaller - when I could no longer climb the stairs - but I feel I'm being pushed out."
In principle, she's not opposed to the idea that she should move somewhere smaller in the village, freeing up her home to a young family living in overcrowded accommodation who need it. But there is no smaller property for her to move to, and, extraordinarily, there is no sign of a desperate young family waiting to move into her current home even if she does..."
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/20/bedroom-tax-despair-tory-village 