Winter Fuel Payment

Mike Wood Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mike Wood (Kingswinford and South Staffordshire) (Con)]

The Government’s choice to remove the winter fuel payment from 21,365 of my constituents is cruel. The payments have been a lifeline for so many pensioners, helping them to stay warm during the harsh winter months. Most pensioners live on fixed incomes, so having almost no notice—no time to prepare—means that the impact of this loss of income on many pensioner households will be that it is increasingly difficult for them to afford basic necessities.

A number of Labour Members have talked about difficult choices, but the reality is that the Government have run away from difficult choices. They have ducked the difficult choices. The difficult choice would have been to be upfront with voters during the election campaign, to explain why they felt this was necessary, appropriate and, as some have said, morally right, and to trust voters to decide whether to give them that mandate. Instead, they ran away. There are difficult choices, but unfortunately the difficult choices are the ones that they have left our constituents to face.

[Mr Peter Bedford (Mid Leicestershire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this choice sets a dangerous precedent? Free bus passes, prescription charges and, indeed, access to healthcare itself are all now at risk because of the logic being put forward by the Labour party in respect of pensioners’ ability to afford them.

[Mike Wood]

My hon. Friend is clearly correct. Many people, but particularly pensioners, will be worried about what this Chancellor will take away from them next. Without these payments, many will be forced to choose between heating their homes and other essential expenses such as food or medication—people such as my constituent Linda, who wrote to me:

“My husband has several medical issues this year and I am very worried about the heating situation…I think it is likely that we will cut back on nourishing food.

I cannot believe that a British Government would penalize our generation like this.”

Another constituent, Dawn, wrote:

“Now I fear the winter months, and afraid…of hypothermia.

I personally am just above the threshold to qualify for pension credits. I am a single person claiming state pension and also have a small NHS pension…I can foresee me not using my central heating this winter.”

Those are difficult choices that this Chancellor and this Government have forced on too many of our pensioners, and they are choices that no one should have to make, and particularly not those who have contributed so much to our society.

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

The Government the hon. Gentleman supported were responsible for driving living standards down, in the first Parliament on record in which that happened. Does he not agree that it is traditionally bad form for the arsonist to start criticising the fire brigade?

[Mike Wood]

I think that the hon. Gentleman has a huge amount of cheek. He should consider first the inheritance of that previous Conservative Government: the present candidate for the chairmanship of the Business and Trade Committee had written that there was no money left. He should also bear in mind that what we saw during those 14 years was not only restoration in the economy but a huge growth in pensioner income, and what we see now is the fastest growth in the G7, unemployment at record low levels, and inflation also back at low levels.

The Chancellor wants us to believe that this decision suddenly came to her at some point in the run-up to the King’s Speech, some time after the general election, and that it would not have been possible for her to imagine it before polling day. She claimed in July that it was not a decision that she wanted to make. However, as has already been pointed out, in March 2014 she stood at the Opposition Dispatch Box, barely feet away from where I am now, demanding that winter fuel payments be means-tested. In July she said that it was not a decision that she expected to make, yet, miraculously, this year’s Labour manifesto was the first in almost two decades without that specific commitment to protect winter fuel payments.

This is a decision that had been a decade in the making—a decade in the planning. Labour had a decade in which to prepare and get it right, but we are seeing how poorly thought through it was. We cannot have a Social Security Advisory Committee report, and we cannot have an impact assessment. Labour imagined that it could take the money away from pensioners with no impact on our NHS or on charities. This decision is wrong, and it needs to be reversed.