Winter fuel payments scrapped for people not on benefits or pension credits
The chancellor on Monday announced a series of spending cuts to address a black hole in the public finances left by the previous Conservative government
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Rachel Reeves has announced that older people not in receipt of pension credits or other means tested benefits will no longer receive winter fuel payments from this year onwards.
The chancellor on Monday announced a series of spending cuts to address a black hole in the public finances left by the previous Conservative government.
The winter fuel payment is a payment of between £250 and £600 to help people over the age of 66 with their heating bills.
Around 10 million pensioners and seven million pensioner households are expected to be affected by the changes.
Ms Reeves admitted that scrapping it for some people was “not a decision I wanted to make”, but said it is the “responsible thing to do”.
She added: “This level of overspend is not sustainable. Left unchecked, it is a risk to economic stability and, unlike the party opposite, I will never take risks with our country’s economic stability.”
But she reiterated the party’s manifesto commitment to protect the state pension triple lock and not impose tax rises on working people, saying they shouldn’t “pick up the tab” on what she claimed were Tory failures.
Announcing a swathe of spending cuts, the chancellor accused the previous government of having hidden the true extent of Treasury overspend from the public, claiming Labour had inherited a £22billion hole in public finances.
Ms Reeves told the Commons: “Today I’m making the difficult decision that those not in receipt of pension credit or certain other means-tested benefits will no longer receive the winter fuel payment from this year onwards.
“The government will continue to provide winter fuel payments worth £200 for households receiving pension credit or £300 to households in receipt of pension credit with someone over the age of 80.
“Let me be clear, 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.
“It is the responsible thing to do to fix the foundations of our economy and bring back economic stability.”
But shadow chancellor Jeremy Hunt said Ms Reeves’ spending inheritance statement was “not economic, it’s political”.
Mr Hunt said: “Today, she will fool absolutely no-one with a shameless attempt to lay the grounds for tax rises she didn’t have the courage to tell us about.”
He added: “She says the information is new, but she herself told the Financial Times, ‘you don’t need to win an election to find out the state of public finances as we’ve got the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) now’.
“Paul Johnson of the IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) says the state of public finances were apparent pre-election to anyone who cared to look, which is why he and other independent figures say her argument is not credible and won’t wash.”
The shadow chancellor later said: “Today’s exercise is not economic, it’s political.
“She wants to blame the last Conservative government for tax rises and project cancellations she’s been planning all along.”
Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK hit out at the decision, describing it as a “disastrous outcome”.
She said: “We strongly oppose the means-testing of Winter Fuel Payment because our initial estimate is that as many as two million pensioners who badly need the money to stay warm this winter will not receive it and will be in trouble as a result – yet at the other end of the spectrum well-off older people will scarcely notice the difference – a social injustice.
“A big reason for this disastrous outcome is that more than one in three pensioners entitled to pension credit, the qualifying benefit for winter fuel payment under this proposal, don’t receive it, a proportion that’s been roughly constant for many years.
“More than 800,000 older people living on very low incomes – under £218.25 a week for single pensioners and under £332.95 for couples – who are already missing out of the pension credit they are entitled to get to boost their incomes, will now lose the winter fuel payment that helps them to pay their fuel bills.”
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