Pensioners are “worried sick” that they won’t be able to heat their homes this year, parliamentarians have been told ahead of a Commons vote on winter fuel allowance.
From this year, older people in England and Wales who are not in receipt of pension credit or certain other means-tested benefits, will no longer receive the winter fuel payments.
Restriction of winter fuel allowance would mean around five in six retirees living below the poverty line will miss out on help paying their winter fuel bills.
Policymakers concerned with the impact this will have on their constituents, addressed the Commons leader Lucy Powell at business questions on Thursday.
Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse said that as the energy bills are set to rise this winter, many pensioners in Bath are “worried sick that they will not be able to heat their homes this winter.”
“Insulating homes and pension rises must come before we cut the winter allowance. I hope the government will really listen to our side of the argument,” she told MPs.
Following a debate on the changes, the House of Commons will take a vote on Sept. 10.
Powell said that the government wasn’t “afraid” to debate the cuts in Parliament. Since entering Downing Street in July, Labour has said that its predecessors have left the government with a £22 billion budget hole.
“The legacy they have left us means we have had to make some really difficult decisions, decisions we did not want to make, like means testing the winter fuel payment.
Paying the Price
The upcoming vote was welcomed by the shadow Commons leader Chris Philp, who said that some of his Croydon South constituents are “desperate with worry” at the proposed changes.Philp told the House that an older constituent had told him: “The allowance meant I could turn the heating on. Now I fear hypothermia during the coming winter months.”
Anther Conservative MP, Caroline Johnson, said she was concerned that Labour’s policy will lead to the unnecessary ill health and death of elderly people.
Tough Decision
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has defended the policy and told MPs on Wednesday that it was a “tough decision” required to “stabilise our economy.”He also said that Labour will “align housing benefit and pension credit” and reiterated the government’s commitment to the triple lock. The policy guarantees the state pension will rise by inflation, average wage growth, or 2.5 percent.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has said that the government needs to be fiscally responsible in the light of the inherited “absolute mess” of state finances.
“But we were very clear in the run-up to the general election, we wouldn’t play fast and loose with the country’s finances because that’s what the Tories did, and that’s why we’re in this mess in the first place, and that we will do everything we can to grow our economy,“ she told ”BBC Breakfast.”
Charity Age UK has criticised the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance, describing it as “reckless and wrong.”
The decision came with “virtually no notice and no compensatory measures to protect poor and vulnerable pensioners,” the charity said in a statement. It has also launched a petition calling for the government to halt their proposed change and “think again.”
