Should people who lose a child be subjected after only three months to a tax on their housing? This is an issue highlighted by the National Bereavement Alliance. It says that when universal credit is introduced, families who have lost a loved one will not have the current 52 weeks to decide whether to reuse the old room, but will be penalised by the bedroom tax after only three months. In many cases they will not only be coping with bereavement but also paying off the costs of the funeral.

The Metro this morning carries the heartbreaking tale of 11-year-old Caleb Hollow who was killed in a car accident at the end of his road. The family are now considered to be underoccupying because, with Caleb gone, the younger brother has his own room. Devon and Cornwall Housing are implementing government policy by asking them to pay £13 extra a week.

The bedroom tax is hated, not because in the grand scheme of things it affects huge numbers of people – only 660,000 people are subject to it overall – but because it strikes at the very heart of our sense of security, our home.

The people who come to see me as a councillor about the bedroom tax are not very numerous, but they are often very vulnerable. One woman was disabled and her husband needed to sleep in a separate room because he disturbed her too much in the middle of the night. Often they are women in their late 50s, the matriarchs of their families who need an extra room to have their grandchildren to stay. Tragically, one woman described how she needed the extra room, because that was the only way her homeless, drug addict son was allowed by the courts to have access to his young daughter.

A mentally ill woman I helped had a relapse because she was so scared her flat would be considered to be two-bedroom and she would be forced to move. The council came round to measure it and found it was under the magic 50 square metre mark, so she was allowed to stay.

Some of these people may be saved by the loophole which was reported today by the Guardian, which means that people who have lived in their houses since 1996 cannot be penalised. But it is the whole policy which should be scrapped.

The bedroom tax is all that is wrong about some kinds of policymaking. It is arbitrary. It takes too little account of personal circumstances. This mean-minded legislation creates a mean state. It attacks people in the private sphere where they are most vulnerable. And it is clunky, so clunky that the government’s standard defence that councils will have to help some families temporarily with discretionary payments.

Nor does it generate much money. The government’s estimate is that it will save £500m, though many councils think it will actually cost more. Wigan and Leigh Housing say they do not have enough smaller flats so will be moving people into the private sector, which is more expensive.

If people get into trouble through rent arrears or because they take out large loans to survive – and my experience in Camden is that many people are not coming for help on this but saying they will ‘cope’ in some way – the state will end up bailing them out down the line in more expensive ways.

And it is cowardly because it doesn’t even deal with the problem it purports to solve which is the underoccupation of social housing, because the people most likely to be underoccupying are pensioners and the Tories and Lib Dems are not levying the bedroom tax on them.

It is right that the Labour party is opposing the bedroom tax and vowing to scrap it. The Tories are creating a society where everyone is even more insecure, particularly the poor. It used to be that the state at least offered the poorest security and that insecurity was found in the private sector only. Now we find insecurity everywhere.

Of course there are problems of overoccupation and underoccupation in local areas, but they are difficult, granular problems which affect different families and communities in different ways and they need to be solved in those communities and even on individual estates. In one of my council blocks an overcrowded family swapped with the elderly man downstairs to everyone’s satisfaction.

Our job in government is going to be about understanding this, just as we understood in the last government how antisocial behaviour affected the quality of life on many housing estates. It will be about creating a society where everyone is secure, and that means more secure housing.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress. She tweets @SallyGimson

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Photo: Simon Hogg