One January some years ago I received a real jaw-dropper of an email from my dear friend and former colleague, the late journalist and author Graham Lord, who divided his year between properties he owned in the Caribbean and the south of France.
In it, he urged me – apparently in all seriousness – to write a column
campaigning for expats like him who had been cruelly denied their winter fuel payments because they failed to meet the UK government’s residence requirement.
At first, I thought he was winding me up, as he basked on his sun-baked beach in paradise. So I emailed back to him: ‘You’re joking, right?’
I have a degree of sympathy with the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves – words I never imagined I would write
Confiscating winter fuel payments without notice will leave many with the agonising choice between heating and eating
He replied angrily that, No, he most certainly wasn’t. He had paid UK taxes throughout his working life, he said. Meanwhile, pensioners who lived in Britain were given the allowance, whether or not they had to pay the heating bills – and quite a few of them didn’t, for one reason or another.
Why the hell should they get the tax-free payment and not him?
Well, I could see that there was some logical force behind his argument. But I was damned if I was going to make myself ridiculous by demanding readers’ sympathy for my friend under that palm tree by the sea, as they shivered in the icy British winter.
Weren’t there worthier causes to champion than his right to keep his glass topped up with pina colada at the British taxpayer’s expense?
But then I became a pensioner myself, five years ago, and those winter fuel payments started popping automatically into my bank account. I got to thinking: if it was ridiculous that expats in my friend’s position should think they had a right to these payments, surely it wasn’t much less absurd that people in my position should receive them.
True, I live in England, as I’ve always done, and I have to endure the worst the weather may throw at us during the winter months. But like so many other pensioners, I can’t honestly claim that I need the extra money to see me through.
The fact is that the Mail pays me handsomely for my weekly ramblings, while over the past 50 years or so,
I’ve also built up a pretty substantial pension pot.
While I’ve kept working, however, I haven’t needed to draw on it – and I’m very reluctant to do so, because I’m determined to leave my much poorer widow enough to keep her in modest comfort when I’m gone.
Add to these assets the value of our suburban semi – bought in 1988 for around £150,000, if I remember rightly, but now worth only a little short of £1million – and I suppose I must count myself among the one-in-four over-65s whose total household wealth is said to run into seven figures.
Mind you, like so many pensioners in my circumstances, I don’t live or feel a bit like a millionaire. But I suppose that, strictly speaking, that’s what I am. I may not be able to feed or clothe my family with bricks and mortar alone. But I do have the option of converting the house into money (though if others are anything like me, they will be loath to uproot themselves or to join an equity release scheme).
What is certain, however, is that while the Mail still employs me, I will have comfortably enough cash coming in to cover my fuel bills, all year round.
I therefore have a degree of sympathy with the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves – words I never imagined I would write – when she says she wants to save £1.5billion a year by scrapping winter fuel payments to ten million pensioners like me. Instead, she wants to give them only to those who actually need them, by which she means those poor enough to receive other benefits.
Please don’t tell me, by the way, that there was never anything stopping me from sending the money back to the Treasury, if I felt it was wrong for me to receive it.
For one thing, I’m not a ruddy saint, and for another, the Government would only have wasted it on bonuses for diversity officers, or some other such idiocy. Far wiser, I’ve always reckoned, to spend the money on cigarettes, booze or Mrs U’s favourite charity, by which I mean our four struggling sons and their young families.
But I have two very serious reservations about Ms Reeves’s policy. One is her truly shocking failure to mention it during the election campaign, when she must have had it in mind, or she wouldn’t have come up with it so soon after taking office. This strikes me as nothing less than an outrage against democracy.
Say what you like about David Cameron’s first administration – and I’ve said plenty, by no means all of it flattering – but at least he made no secret of his plans for austerity during the 2010 election campaign.
Sir Keir Starmer’s lot, by contrast, seem to have gone through the 2024 campaign telling themselves: ‘It doesn’t matter a jot what we promise the suckers now, as long as it encourages them to vote for us. We can reveal our true plans when we’re safely in power.’
And my other objection? Though I don’t need the winter fuel payment myself, we all know there are a great many who need it desperately.
Indeed, the charity Age UK calculates that the policy will leave some two million struggling to keep warm when winter closes in. They include an estimated 880,000 who are eligible for pension credit, but don’t receive it – either because they are too proudly self-reliant to accept what many of my parents’ generation regarded as charity from the state, or because the process of applying is too complicated.
Then there are about one million others whose modest incomes are marginally too high to claim, and an unknown number, thought by Age UK to be at least 200,000, living in energy-inefficient homes, who for health reasons need the heating turned up high to stay well.
To some of us, the maximum £300-a-year payment to the over-80s may not sound like life-changing money. But to those over-80s who have to get by on no more than the full basic state pension, it represents three per cent of their annual income, which of course makes it more valuable than the 2.5 per cent guaranteed by the triple lock.
Confiscating it without notice, as Ms Reeves proposes, will leave many with the agonising choice between heating and eating when the weather turns bitter. Inevitably, some will die because of it.
Now, I can’t claim to have the secret of how best and most efficiently to distinguish between those who need the payment and those who don’t. But the former pensions minister, Ros Altmann, offers what seems to me to be a sensible and humane way to proceed.
In a letter to The Times yesterday, she suggested that, rather than scrapping the payment, it would be much fairer to amalgamate it with the rest of the state pension, thereby making it taxable and recouping some of the cost to the Treasury.
The Government should then conduct a review of pensioner support to consider the next step. This would surely be a good start.
What is clear is that, as it stands, Ms Reeves’s blunderbuss of a policy is both ill thought-through and decidedly inhumane. It’s a much more grievous injustice, dare I say it, than past governments’ failure to send tax-free payments every winter to my mates, sprawled in their deckchairs by the Caribbean.
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