Winter Fuel Payment

Gregory Stafford Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

rose—

[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

rose—

[Louise Jones]

I will just make a bit of progress and then I will let the right hon. Member and the hon. Member intervene. I do not think there is a single Labour Member who is not conscious of the impact of the decisions that we, as a Government, are making. We rightly laud our achievements, but we recognise that we have had to make tough decisions.

Pensioners are not the only group facing poverty in this country. Child poverty has rocketed over the past decade to a shamefully high level. Not one of those children ever received a winter fuel payment. Plenty of others have been facing the effects of poverty, and shamefully that includes a rocketing number of people in work. As a Labour Government, it is our task to ensure that we are ending the scourge of poverty once and for all, whether for children, people in work or pensioners.

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[Louise Jones]

Sadly, it is a feature of this debate that it is very easy for Members across the Opposition Benches to say, “You shouldn’t do something,” but very difficult to say what should be done instead.

[Gregory Stafford]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Louise Jones]

I will keep going, because I have been speaking for a long time and I know that lots of Members want to get in. I am terribly sorry.

To cut to the chase, the Government are determined to fix the foundations of this country, sort out the systemic issues that we face, tackle the cost of living and deliver an NHS fit for everybody in this country.

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[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

In politics, in my opinion, it matters hugely how we make arguments. My generation of politicians, many of us newly elected, have grown up in an era of ceaseless turbulence. Our world has become more insecure, our economy has flatlined, and our democracy is sometimes strained. That means we have responsibilities as elected politicians in how we make arguments, and that matters for this debate.

First, over several decades this House has ceded too much power to unelected and sometimes unaccountable bodies—agencies, quangos and administrators. Elected representatives must have the power to change the things for which the public holds them accountable.

Secondly, the public are tired of being told that we have no choice, that our hands are tied and that we must do this because lawyers or economists said so. Our job is to make arguments to the public on the basis of principle and not solely of necessity. After all, why vote, if the people we vote for are not in charge, but lawyers, economists, quangos or agencies are? What is democracy for, if the people we elect do not control the things that affect our lives?

To restore trust in politics, we must show that politics matters. That is why it is vital that we articulate our choices in terms of principles.

[Gregory Stafford]

rose—

[Josh Simons]

Hopefully, what I am about to say will answer the hon. Gentleman’s point. [Interruption.] If it does not, he is welcome to come in. Let me make clear the principle behind the reforms that we are debating today: those who need support to heat their homes must get it. Nobody should be cold at home because they cannot afford to turn on their heating. When Gordon Brown introduced the winter fuel payments—

[Gregory Stafford]

I entirely agree with everything the hon. Gentleman has just said, but I am sure that, like me, he has received hundreds, if not thousands, of messages from pensioners saying that they are suffering and cannot heat their homes. If his point is one of principle, then clearly he must vote to overturn this policy so that the people who I am sure are contacting him as well as me will be able to heat their homes next winter, as they were unable to do this time round.

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[Matthew Patrick]

I am finishing on the intervention that I just took; I might then come to another.

Many constituents in Wirral West really suffered through Tory mismanagement on the economy and on public services. That mismanagement saw a status quo fail our pensioners and fail all of us. Getting the country back on track required us to support those who need it most. No one in my constituency thinks that the very richest in society like Sir Richard Branson need Government support to get by.

[Gregory Stafford]

There is probably unanimity across the Chamber that Richard Branson does not need the winter fuel payment, but it is the poorest pensioners—those who are earning just above £13,500—who are losing out. Let us not have the nonsense about Richard Branson or people swigging champagne; let us actually talk about the people who are suffering and will be going into hospital because they are cold and may end up dying. Those are the people we should be talking about.

[Matthew Patrick]

I will come to that, but I gently make the point, as was just said, that the Conservatives were paying Sir Richard Branson the winter fuel allowance every year. They could have changed that, but they did not.

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[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

I do not know whether it is incompetence, pig-headedness or callousness, or indeed all of the above, that has led this Labour Government to take the winter fuel payment away from some of the poorest in society. So often today from the Government Benches we have heard about tough choices, but tough choices do not automatically mean the right choice; in fact, in this case it is entirely the wrong choice.

I expected to see the panoply of the usual greasers and crawlers from the Labour Benches here today, but they are not here. In fact, as my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson) mentioned, we have seen Labour Members who seem to have donned the hair shirt and decided that this should be their cause célèbre to demonstrate, either to themselves or to their party, that being tough somehow means that they are being a strong Government, which is absolute nonsense. All that the scrapping of the winter fuel payment will lead to is excess deaths. We had warm words from the hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick), but warm words will not heat the pensioners who are freezing in their homes this winter.

In my constituency of Farnham and Bordon, more than 18,200 pensioners will have lost the winter fuel payment, and many of them are just above the income threshold for the pension credit benefit. These people are contributing to our society but earning only £13,500 a year. They are not the champagne quaffers that the hon. Member for Makerfield (Josh Simons) talked about; they are the people who fought for and served this country. They have put money into the system and rightly expect a tiny bit back to heat their homes.

At a pension credit surgery I held in October, pensioners shared their fears and frustrations. One word kept coming up: betrayal. That is betrayal by this Labour Government of their vote. They are not asking for luxuries or for anything like a handout; all they want is to be able to heat their home in winter. They want to live with dignity, and they want to do so without having to choose whether to heat their home or put food on the table.

The idea that this Government would do this without an impact assessment and, subsequently, without doing any monitoring of the impact is shocking. In his winding-up speech, will the Minister commit to doing a full impact assessment to see the rate of NHS admissions and the mortality rates that he talked about, so that we understand whether this policy has killed people? This is not about money; it is about values and decency. Those who built this country should not have to shiver in their homes because of this cruel policy.

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[Mr Bedford]

No, I am not giving way.

That small sum of money allowed pensioners to keep the heating on, helping them to make it through those cold winter nights, and supported them in not having to choose between heating and eating. Wherever I go in my constituency of Mid Leicestershire, I have conversations with older people, and the word they use is “betrayal”. It is a betrayal felt deeply in their hearts, particularly by those who helped build this country.

Let us not forget that 348 Labour MPs are complicit in taking the winter fuel payment away from millions of pensioners, and 71% of disabled pensioners have lost that vital support. Labour Members have repeatedly told us that theirs is the party of the NHS, but let us face the facts: they are all complicit in costing the national health service an additional £169 million, which is the cost of looking after the 100,000 pensioners who have been left out in the cold.

[Gregory Stafford]

We have heard the argument from Labour Members that taking away the winter fuel payment somehow benefits the NHS, because money is going into it. Does my hon. Friend agree that the chief executive of NHS England has said that actually, every single penny that the Government are putting into the NHS this year is being wiped out through national insurance rises, inflation and drug price increases?

[Mr Bedford]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The numbers simply do not stack up.

In comparison, it was a Conservative Government who introduced the triple lock and increased the state pension by almost £4,000. It was a Conservative Government who reduced the number of pensioners living in absolute poverty by more than 200,000, and it is the Conservatives who have pensioners’ interests at heart.