Well, it didn’t take long for Labour to get rid of British pensioners, did it? Despite promising during the election campaign that winter fuel payments would be secure for them, on Monday Chancellor Rachel Reeves effectively scrapped them for the ten million pensioners without pension credit.
The government can no longer meet its expectations because there is apparently a new £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances, which Labour knew nothing about at the time of the election. Well, if you believe me, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
What has actually happened – as Andrew Neill explained in these pages yesterday – is that millions of pensioners in Britain will pay for Labour’s disincentives in other areas, such as huge inflationary pay rises for public sector workers (not 22 per cent for unsuspecting youngsters). Dr.
On Monday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves duly cancelled her pension credit for the 10 million retirees who do not have it.
Considering it was a Labour chancellor, Gordon Brown, who introduced the first winter fuel payment in 1997, the betrayal is shocking.
And for me it’s personal. My parents are disabled and in their 90s. I run errands to take care of them and at the same time help with the bills.
A few years ago it cost them up to £200 a month to heat their homes in the middle of winter, but now their bills are over £400 because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent electricity prices soaring. Their estimated annual gas and electricity costs are £2,500 a year.
Lower wholesale prices have eased the burden recently, but my parents’ bills are still about 30 percent higher than they were three years ago. And in October, our energy supplier will be able to charge 10 percent more if, as predicted, the price cap is raised again.
This year, Rachel Reeves has ordered that parents should not receive government help to pay their bills. This is because they do not claim benefits such as pension credit (which is added to the state pension for people on low incomes). Under a new means-tested regime, only those who claim benefits will be eligible – a stingy mandate that will leave millions of pensioners out on the street this winter.
Don’t worry about how many will go to bed with their coats on or succumb to hypothermia.
Government apologists would have us believe that the withdrawal of winter fuel payments only affects “rich” pensioners. Despite the “triple lock”, Britain still lags behind in the state pension provision table in Europe, below countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria according to the “European Pension Balance Index”. The idea of a single pensioner earning £11,350 a year (a few pounds over the pension credit limit) is outrageous.
My parents are not exactly poor. They own their own homes and save for a rainy day after hard work. However, their wealth, like that of many Britons – especially those living in the south of England – is tied up in their homes. But homes are not just assets, they are liabilities, especially when you factor in maintenance costs and household bills.
Paying for winter fuel was a blessing as it meant my parents could afford to keep the heating on for longer during the winter, something which no doubt helped keep them alive, particularly my mother who battles a rare blood condition and feels cold all the time.
But if you believed anything pushed by right-wing celebrities this week, you’d think they were millionaires.
Government apologists would have us believe that the withdrawal of winter fuel payments only affects “rich” pensioners.
Step forward, Dame Mary Beard. The TV classicist can’t wait to tweet her congratulations to the Chancellor on his cruel cuts.
“Thanks Rachel Reeves,” she wrote. “We have tried to get our fuel allowance for the winter but we don’t need it. It’s ok to get away from them like we do.”
Good for wealthy Mary. Most pensioners who lose their winter fuel allowance need it. My parents aren’t TV presenters prominently displaying their latest Waterstone and Blackwell book, and I hope yours aren’t either.
On X, one Francis Smith said it best: ‘When you’re obviously so comfortable, you find it very difficult to thank Rachel Reeves for scrapping the WFA for poor pensioners who don’t deserve pension credit. Your lack of concern is… shocking.’
Yet the beard is an ideal of the comfortable in-house cheerleaders of the new Labour government. If the Tories scrapped the fuel subsidy for the winter, we would never have heard of it. The “mean old Tory” would have abstained. Rishi Sunak was called ‘Nani Killer’. The BBC’s Have I Got News for You would have had a field day if it was a fest of unbearable smugness.
But when Labour did the dirty work, just three weeks after taking office, it was hailed as a “sensible government”. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
It wasn’t long ago that a bloated Sir Keir Starmer was posing as a friend of a pensioner at Prime Minister’s Questions.
“Will you now rule out removing pensioners’ fuel payments for the winter?” the then opposition leader asked in May, claiming that Sunac was going to take away their benefits to plug a black hole in government funding.
A month ago, the pious star wrung her hands in an X-rated video over her deep concern for pensioners who cannot afford heating.
“My Labour Party will always stand with pensioners disappointed by the Tories,” he tweeted. He was then hoping for the much-needed “grey vote” before the election. Once he got it, he showed his true colours.
And it is not just the winter fuel subsidy that Labour has its sights set on.
Reeves also scrapped Boris Johnson’s planned cap on welfare spending.
In October next year, the highest bill we will pay anyone for our care will be £86,000. Now, the sky is the limit.
Once again, it was a broken promise. Only in June did Labour’s health spokesman Wes Streeting confirm that the party was committed to introducing the cap.
“We have no plans to change that and I want to bring certainty and stability to the system at this stage,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme haltingly.
Make no mistake: Labour is coming out in support of Britain’s older people. As the Chancellor himself said after announcing his cuts, “this is the start of a process, not the end.”
Reeves’s tax adviser, former HMRC boss Sir Edward Troup, has already made his feelings clear, saying baby boomer pensioners like him were “ridiculously better off” and were a “complete disgrace”.
“I fear we are going to be looking at more senior members of society,” he warned. He described the granting of free television licences to over-75s as “ridiculous” and said means-testing for state pensions “needs to be discussed.”
With officials so blatantly anti-pension, what are the chances that within a year the state pension will be means-tested?
They need to stop the work in its tracks. That’s why I’m launching a campaign to reinstate universal fuel payments in winter, because if we sit back and do nothing, things are likely to get worse.
Neil Clark is a journalist and author.
