Living in a state of insecurity
This chapter begins by highlighting the circumstances and conditions of participants’ lives preceding the introduction of the Bedroom Tax policy. This serves as a starting point for the chapter, illustrating that the policy was introduced into lives that were already characterised by income insecurity, employment precarity, and ill-health. It charts the ways in which participants responded to the implementation of the policy and the impact it had in informing decisions about moving or absorbing the extra rental expenditure. This chapter is concerned with the impact at the household level documenting how life became more difficult as the extra financial outlay placed a strain on participants financially, socially, and psychologically. In the final section, the focus turns to how the policy worked to transmit insecurity into the lives of participants’ children, furthering the inter-generational transmission of inequality through the introduction of a precarious housing situation which had not been there previously.