Dear Chancellor,
I’m baffled. I’m angry. I’m flabbergasted – and I am far from alone.
Your decision last month to deprive some ten million pensioners of their annual winter fuel payment has spawned an outpouring of fury so red hot you simply cannot ignore it for a minute longer. It isn’t going to go away. It’s gone nuclear and you need to react.
You made a howler – you know it, I know it, many Labour MPs know it and the country knows it – and you need to own up as soon as possible.
If you don’t, you are going to alienate a whole generation from ever voting Labour again. Iron Chancellor? Prudent Chancellor? No, in the eyes of many pensioners, you will be seen as a modern-day Cruella de Vil who viewed them as people to be financially milked like Cruella’s dalmatians.
Not the most auspicious of starts for you and your party which in the run up to the general election talked reassuringly about pensioners deserving ‘security in retirement’.
‘You made a howler – you know it, I know it, many Labour MPs know it and the country knows it – and you need to own up as soon as possible.’ Pictured: Chancellor Rachel Reeves
‘In the eyes of many pensioners, you will be seen as a modern-day Cruella de Vil who viewed them as people to be financially milked like Cruella’s dalmatians’
Indeed, you may remember a video clip of your boss Sir Keir Starmer talking movingly about a conversation he had with an 84-year-old pensioner in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.
He said she stayed in bed until midday during winter to save on her heating bills. ‘That’s an awful position to put a pensioner in,’ he opined (it is still on social media if you want to view it).
In taking away the winter fuel payment – worth up to £300 – from all bar the most financially stretched pensioners, you have injected insecurity into millions of households across the country.
Shameful, especially as double-digit increases in energy bills are just around the corner. For some pensioners like the Dewsbury lady, it may again mean staying longer in bed this winter, going cold or cutting back on hot meals.
‘Pensioners, already struggling with ever rising food bills and sky-high insurance premiums, deserve so much better from a Labour Government.’ Pictured: Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer
Pensioners, already struggling with ever rising food bills and sky-high insurance premiums, deserve so much better from a Labour Government.
Never in more than 30 years of writing on personal finance issues for this newspaper have I witnessed such anger from the country’s splendid army of pensioners.
Unlike the suspension of the state pension triple lock guarantee in April 2022, which pensioners quietly took on the chin because of the grievous impact of Covid and lockdown on the UK economy, your restriction of the winter fuel payment to those in receipt of pension credit (and other benefits) has been met with universal disapproval. No, I’m being too kind. Outright hostility.
A petition launched by charity Age UK calling for you to halt the changes has already attracted 420,000 supporters.
The charity estimates that as many as two million pensioners will be materially impacted by the restrictions you are imposing on eligibility for the winter fuel payment.
These pensioners, the charity says, comprise three groups:
- Those on low incomes who just miss out on pension credit.
- Those with high energy demands because of disability or illness.
- And the near one million elderly people who are eligible for pension credit, but don’t claim it for a variety of reasons (pride, not having online access, or finding the application overwhelming).
Meanwhile, hundreds of readers have contacted Money Mail since your announcement late last month to vent their spleens. ‘Spiteful,’ ‘disgusted,’ ‘outraged,’ and ‘callous’ are adjectives that feature heavily in their messages.
So, Chancellor, what in heaven’s name possessed you to launch this wicked financial attack on the country’s pensioners?
When you announced the culling of winter fuel payment in the House of Commons late last month, you put the blame squarely at the door of the previous Conservative government which you said had left a yawning £22billion hole in the public finances. This hole, you said, was why the cut in winter fuel payment would also be followed by the axing of the £86,000 social care cap in October next year – another big blow for those pensioners who require expensive long-term care in later life.
Explaining the winter fuel payment restriction, you said: ‘This is not a decision I wanted to make, nor is it the one that I expected to make.
‘But these are the necessary and urgent decisions that I must make.’ Yet I – and many of Money Mail’s readers – simply do not believe you.
We don’t think that either the cut to the winter fuel payment (saving £1.4billion this year) or the axing of the adult social care cap (£1.1billion a year by 2026) had anything to do with shoring up the nation’s finances.
As Andrew Neil eloquently explained in yesterday’s Daily Mail, most of the £22billion ‘black hole’ was not a result of the alleged mismanagement of the economy’s finances by former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
It was more to do with rewarding members of your paymasters (the trade unions) with inflation-busting pay awards.
To start with, NHS workers, (work from home) civil servants, police officers and members of the armed forces – and in recent weeks train drivers and no doubt in weeks to come, members of the belligerent Rail, Maritime and Transport Union.
Yes, some of these workers deserved decent pay rises, but not all – especially those who caused mayhem to ordinary people’s lives by going out on strike whenever they felt like it.
I (and many readers) believe you hit pensioners in the pocket because you saw them as an easy target – a segment of the population who you thought would take the loss of the winter fuel payment with good grace and for the greater good of the country.
Well, you were wrong on that front. You underestimated their ability to see through a massive financial injustice.
I am also convinced that when making your statement to the House of Commons on July 29, you wanted to live up to your portraiture as an Iron Chancellor.
‘Go back to the drawing board, listen to the likes of Age UK and pensioner champions such as Baroness Altmann, and come up with a fairer overhaul,’ says Jeff Prestridge
You did this by announcing benefit and spending cuts that few commentators had expected (they, me included, all thought that you would wait until your Budget at the end of October).
Pensioners were convenient sacrificial lambs even though there were plenty of other areas of government spending that you could have given a haircut without stirring up a hornet’s nest – for example, overseas aid to the likes of China, India and Malaysia.
It’s good that in recent days your Government has said it will launch a pension credit publicity campaign to boost take-up of the benefit – which in turn will trigger automatic winter fuel payments to successful applicants.
This will include a pension credit ‘week of action’ next month. Yet it remains to be seen whether this proves successful – similar campaigns in the past have proved largely ineffective.
What makes far greater sense is for you to put the curtailment of winter fuel payments on hold for a year.
Go back to the drawing board, listen to the likes of Age UK and pensioner champions such as Baroness Altmann, and come up with a fairer overhaul.
One that takes the payment away from those who patently don’t need it – higher rate taxpayers for example – while maintaining it for those who rely on it.
If you did that, you would win great respect while being true to Labour’s longstanding commitment to social justice.
PS: Iron Chancellors are allowed to listen.
See: gov.uk/pension-credit/how-to-claim and the petition at: ageuk.org.uk