THE charity Christians Against Poverty has reported “deep concern” among pensioners who will lose the winter fuel allowance, after Parliament voted on Tuesday to restrict it to pension-credit claimants.
Only one Labour MP, John Trickett, backed the Opposition motion, while 52 abstained. The Guardian reported a Downing Street source as saying that all but 12 of the absent MPs had provided legitimate excuses — a claim that was reportedly disputed by some MPs. The motion was defeated by 120 votes.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, the Leader of the Opposition, Rishi Sunak, challenged Sir Keir Starmer to release the Government’s impact assessment, and said that pensioners receiving as little as £13,000 a year would no longer receive the allowance.
Sir Keir replied that an increase in pensions would outstrip the loss of payments, and suggested that it was the previous Government’s actions that had made the measure necessary.
On Wednesday afternoon, a spokesperson for CAP said: “Our local debt-centre teams are now reporting real concerns for pensioners coming to them, who will lose their winter fuel allowance because they are just over the threshold for payment.”
The current threshold for payments was “causing deep concern among our pensioner clients who are already struggling to pay for their essentials, some of whom could miss out on receiving the payment because they are just over the threshold”.
One third of those entitled to pension credit were not claiming it, the CAP spokesperson said. He urged people to use the calculator tool on the charity’s website to check whether there were additional payments they could claim.
Last week, the ChurchWorks Commission, an ecumenical group of church representatives engaged in social action, urged the Government to make it a priority to remove the two-child limit on state benefits. It, too, raised concerns about how the means-testing of the winter fuel payment would affect vulnerable people.
Sixteen members of the commission met Lord Khan, the newly appointed Minister for Faith, Communities and Resettlement. Lord Khan told the group that he wanted to be a “strong ambassador for the ChurchWorks Commission” across all parts of government.
The group also met Sir Stephen Timms, a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, who said that the new Child Poverty Ministerial Taskforce had a “shared agenda on child poverty”.
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