After 14 years of Tory rule, five Conservative prime ministers and rounds of damaging austerity, in July, Labour finally made it to Downing Street. Within less than a month, the exuberance that is often reserved for the changing of the guard was shattered when Rachel Reeves, the UK’s first female chancellor, announced that she was axing the Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) for all but the poorest pensioners.
With one deft swipe of the scythe of austerity, 10 million pensioners across the UK will lose either £200 or £300 a year. This is money that many older people on low, fixed incomes rely on to help them heat their homes, and which is needed now, more than ever, that the price of energy is to rise by 10% in the autumn.
One can’t help but wonder if echoes of ‘Thatcher, the milk snatcher’ and ‘George Osborne, the architect of austerity’, were ringing in the chancellor’s ears when she informed the House of Commons that the cut was necessary to sort out the mess that the Conservatives had left the nation’s finances in.
If they were, they were quickly brushed aside as she went on to declare that this “…is a necessary and urgent decision I must make” to “fix the foundations of our economy and bring back economic stability” in light of the £22 billion black hole created by the previous administration’s unfunded spending commitments.
It has been argued that means-testing the benefit will allow it to be better targeted at those who need it and will do away with the practice of giving taxpayers’ money to rich pensioners. What has not been emphasised is that the WFP ceased to be an automatic payment years ago. It’s hard to imagine a newly retired rich person calling up the WFP Centre to apply for the heating help.
Reeves’ controversial decision to restrict the WFP to the neediest is expected to save the Treasury £1.3bn this winter and £1.5bn in subsequent years. It does not take a genius to work out that this decision will impact the NHS as its hospital beds and corridors are filled with older people suffering from falls, heart attacks and strokes brought on by living in a cold home. Estimates suggest the cut will cost the NHS an additional £169m a year.
Some older people who voted for Labour in the general election say they feel betrayed by a party they had voted for all their adult life and have cancelled their membership. But does the Labour leadership care? Not one jolt it would seem, as some members are too busy filling up on expensive freebies from wealthy donors to even notice.
