Last Tuesday, word began to spread in Whitehall that the United Nations were set to release a highly critical report about the Under-Occupancy Charge, aka the ‘Bedroom Tax’ to everyone but the government. Downing Street wanted to ignore the report, yet when it emerged that the UN’s Special Rapporteur was lined up for Wednesday’s Today programme, a plan was drawn up to fight back. Grant Shapps was activated and he fired the starting gun on what would be one of the more bizarre media wars this government has got into.
Concern had been growing in the Department for Work and Pensions for several weeks about the behaviour of Raquel Rolnik, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on housing, who was investigating the UK as a representative of the UN’s High Commission on Human Rights. Alarm bells began to ring when she was photographed with the Daily Record newspaper (pictured above), receiving a ‘dossier’ of ‘evidence’ about the policy.
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