Well, it didn’t take long for Labour to shaft Britain’s pensioners, did it? Despite promising during the election campaign that Winter Fuel Payments were safe with them, on Monday Chancellor Rachel Reeves duly abolished them for the ten million retirees who aren’t on Pension Credit.
The Government can’t afford to pay the benefit any more because apparently there’s a new £22billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, which Labour didn’t know about at the time of the election. Well, if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’d like to sell you.
What has really happened – as Andrew Neil explained in these pages yesterday – is that millions of Britain’s pensioners will be paying for Labour’s profligacy in other areas, like vast above-inflation pay hikes for public sector workers – not least 22 per cent for recalcitrant junior doctors.
On Monday Chancellor Rachel Reeves duly abolished them for the ten million retirees who aren’t on Pension Credit
Considering that it was a Labour chancellor, Gordon Brown, who first introduced Winter Fuel Payments in 1997, the betrayal is shocking.
And for me, it’s personal. My parents are disabled and in their late 90s. I juggle work to care for them, while helping them with their bills.
A few years ago their heating cost up to £200 a month in mid-winter, but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices through the roof, bills are now over £400. Their annual estimated cost for gas and electricity is an eye-watering £2,500 a year.
The burden has lightened recently as wholesale prices have come down but my parents’ bills are still about 30 per cent dearer than three years ago. And, come October, our energy provider will be able to charge 10 per cent more, if, as predicted, the price cap is raised yet again.
This year, Rachel Reeves has decreed that parents won’t be getting any government help with their bills. This is because they do not claim benefits like pension credit (which tops up the state pension for those on a low income). Under a new means-tested regime, only those claiming benefits would be eligible – a miserly edict that will leave millions of pensioners in the cold this winter.
How many will go to bed in their coats or succumb to hypothermia doesn’t bear thinking about.
Government apologists will have you believe that the withdrawal of Winter Fuel Payments affects only ‘wealthy’ pensioners. Despite the ‘triple lock’, Britain still languishes down the table of state pension provision in Europe – below the likes of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria according to the ‘European Pension Breakeven Index’. The idea that a single pensioner on £11,350 a year – a few pounds above the Pension Credit limit – is ‘well-off’ is insulting.
My parents aren’t exactly poor. They own their own home and have savings for a rainy day after a life of hard work. Yet their wealth, like that of so many Britons – particularly those living in the south of England – is tied up in their home. But houses aren’t just assets, they are liabilities, especially when the cost of maintenance and household bills are taken into account.
The Winter Fuel Payment was a godsend as it meant my parents could afford to keep the heating on for longer in winter – something which has no doubt helped keep them alive, not least my mother who struggles with a rare blood condition and always feels the cold.
But if you believe some of the drivel spouted by right-on celebrities this week, you’d have thought they were millionaires.
Government apologists will have you believe that the withdrawal of Winter Fuel Payments affects only ‘wealthy’ pensioners
Step forward Dame Mary Beard. The TV classicist could hardly wait to tweet her congratulations to the Chancellor on her cruel cutbacks.
‘Thank you Rachel Reeves,’ she wrote. ‘We have tried to divert our winter fuel allowance, but we don’t need it. It’s right to remove it from those like us.’
Good for well-heeled Mary. The vast majority of pensioners who were losing their winter fuel allowance, meanwhile, do need it. My parents aren’t TV presenters who have their latest books on prominent display in Waterstone’s and Blackwell’s and I expect yours aren’t either.
On X, one Francis Smith put it best: ‘It really is quite callous of you to thank Rachel Reeves for removing WFA from poorer pensioners who don’t qualify for Pension Credit, when you are clearly so comfortably off. Your lack of concern… is shocking.’
Yet Beard is typical of the comfortably-off, inside-the-tent cheerleaders for the new Labour government. Had the Tories scrapped the winter fuel allowance we’d have never heard the last of it. ‘Wicked old Tories’ would have been the refrain. Rishi Sunak would have been called a ‘granny killer’. The unbearable smugfest that is the BBC’s Have I Got News For You would have had a field day.
But when Labour does the dirty deed, just three weeks after taking office, it’s hailed as ‘sensible government’. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
It wasn’t so long ago that a puffed-up Sir Keir Starmer was posing as the pensioner’s friend in Prime Minister’s Questions.
‘Will he now rule out taking pensioners’ winter fuel payments off them,’ the then Leader of the Opposition asked in May, claiming that Sunak was about to rob them of the benefit to plug a black hole in the government’s finances.
A month before, the oh-so pious Starmer wrung his hands in a video on X over his deep concern for pensioners who couldn’t afford to put the heating on.
‘My Labour Party will always be on the side of pensioners let down by the Tories,’ he tweeted. Back then he was courting the much-needed ‘grey vote’ ahead of the election. Once he got it, he showed his true colours.
And it’s not just the winter fuel allowance that is in Labour’s sights.
Reeves has also scrapped Boris Johnson’s planned cap on social care costs.
Come October next year, the maximum bill that any of us would have had to pay towards our care would be £86,000. Now, the sky is the limit.
Again, this was a broken promise. Only in June, Labour’s Health spokesman Wes Streeting confirmed that the party was committed to bringing in the cap.
‘We don’t have any plans to change that situation and that’s the certainty and stability I want to give the system at this stage,’ he said breathlessly on Radio 4’s Today programme.
Make no mistake, Labour are coming for Britain’s old folk. As the Chancellor herself said after announcing her cuts ‘this is the beginning of a process, not the end’.
Reeves’s tax consigliere, the former HMRC Head Sir Edward Troup, has already made his feelings clear by saying that ‘Baby Boomer’ pensioners like him had had it ‘ridiculously good’ and that was a ‘complete disgrace’.
‘I am afraid we are going to have a look at the more senior members of society’, he warned. He called giving free television licences to the over-75s ‘ridiculous’ and said that a ‘debate needs to be had’ on means-testing the state pension.
With people like this in charge who are so nakedly anti-pensioners, what odds that in a year’s time the state pension will become means-tested, too?
Labour must be stopped in their tracks. That’s why I’m launching a campaign to get universal Winter Fuel Payments reinstated, because if we sit back and do nothing, worse is likely to follow.
Neil Clark is a journalist and author
