4 May 2013
What: Stephanie Bottrill dies by suicide. Hours earlier she had told her GP about the stress and anxiety the government’s housing policies were causing her. She leaves behind a suicide note in which she blames the bedroom tax – known by the government as the spare room subsidy removal (which was introduced just one month before her death)– and writes that “the only people to blame are the government”. (In 2015, the suicide of Frances McCormack would also be linked to the bedroom tax, see entry 10 August 2015).
Why significant: Ian Jones, one of the founders of the WOW campaign, later says that her death showed the government failing to “exercise any duty of care towards sick and disabled people when framing their welfare reforms and their continuing refusal to undertake a cumulative impact assessment of these reforms strongly suggests that they were planned as a deliberate crime against humanity”.