The Winter Fuel Payment is a state benefit paid once per year in England and Wales[1] and Northern Ireland to some people old enough to have been born before a specific date.
The payment was first introduced by the Labour Government in 1997 as a universal benefit for pensioners, and was first announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in his Pre-Budget Statement of that year.
[5] The announcement of this policy to remove fuel payments from pensioners took the nation by surprise as it had not been publicised in advance or included in Labour's manifesto for the election.
[6] In August, consumer journalist and founder of MoneySavingExpert, Martin Lewis, suggested that the government should rethink their plans to restrict who would get the payment saying they had gone too far by limiting it to only the "absolute poorest pensioners on the very lowest income".
Labour MP Rachael Maskell said, "Being cold at home can lead to stroke, heart attack, hypothermia, pneumonia and other such illnesses" and recommended that the government should read the work of Professor Sir Michael Marmot and Sir Chris Whitty with respect to this "so that we can take a public health approach to people being warm at home, to mitigate the cost that could come without putting right mitigation around the winter fuel payments”.
[16] On 9 September it was reported that Labour MPs, including frontbenchers, were worried that Reeves's "brutal" plan for the fuel allowance would result in more older people ending up in hospital over the winter.
[19] Government watchdog, the Social Security Advisory Committee, criticising the plan, said it was rushed and ill-conceived, and asked that urgent changes be made to it before the cold winter weather hits.
They are alleging that the UK and Scotland governments did not follow the correct procedure and did not conduct an appropriate consultation or an equality impact assessment before implementing the change.
[22] At the end of November, lawyers for Unite, the trade union, asked the High Court for an urgent judicial review of the policy.
[23] Following the announcement of this policy, the Ipsos monthly tracker poll published in September showed that Starmer was more unpopular with the public than he had been for three years.
[24] Following the commons vote, the results from a JL Partners/38 Degrees focus group of more than 100 people suggested that the new government was losing public support.
[26] A parody song,"Freezing This Christmas", by Sir Starmer and the Granny Harmers, reached number one in the The Official Big Top 40 chart on 15 December 2024.
The profits from the song, which lampoons Starmer's government's actions in abolishing the payment for all but the poorest pensioners, will go to charities supporting the elderly said Chris Middleton, the artist behind it.
[27] Labour MP for the Blaydon and Consett seat, Liz Twist, faced calls from her constituents to resign from her post as chair of the board of trustees at Age UK Gateshead, a charity for older people.
One of the constituents said "Given she [Twist] is a North East MP, representing one of the poorest parts of the country, I feel it’s very hypocritical for her to hold this position and it's disappointing that she did not vote against the removal of the Winter Fuel Payment".
[30] Community Resource, a Shropshire-based charity supporting vulnerable residents estimates that its donations might be down by thousands of pounds due to Reeves's policy.