If the Tories win the next election, will they restore the winter fuel payment to all pensioners? I think we all know that they won’t. Money is tight, and it is hard to imagine, once the change has bedded down, that any future government would reverse it. To pretend otherwise would not only be dishonest; it would insult voters’ intelligence.
By all means have a go at the Chancellor of the Exchequer for her dishonesty, her opportunism, and her poor sense of priorities. But for Heaven’s sake let’s not start demanding more unconditional benefits. It’s not credible.
I mean what I say about Labour’s dishonesty, though. During the election, Keir Starmer released a campaign video in which he excoriated the Tories for leaving pensioners to struggle with energy bills. He spoke of meeting a pensioner in Dewsbury who stayed in bed all morning because she was too cold to get up, and who then wandered around with a padded jacket because she could not afford to turn the heating up. Even by the standards of post-election U-turns, Labour’s is quite something.
And don’t give me any nonsense about this cut being forced on Labour by some unaccounted-for black hole. On the eve of the election, Reeves was complaining about a £71 billion black hole. Now it’s £22 billion. She is pulling numbers out of a hat.
Labour has made this cut, not to try to balance the books, but to fund a massive bung to the public sector unions which bankrolled it during the recent election. The £1.5 billion it will save is more than swallowed up by the cost of giving public-sector workers a 5.5 per cent pay rise when inflation is at 2 per cent – a cost estimated at over £2.5 billion. And that direct cost is just the start of it. Every other trade union will now expect something similar, and public-sector pension liabilities will grow still larger.
So, yes, this is a bad decision. And the double standards of our broadcasters stink. If the last government had made such a cut, the BBC, Channel 4 News, Sky News, and the rest would be scouring the land for cases of pensioners claiming to be in danger of literally freezing to death.
But none of that adds up to a case for restoring the benefit. To repeat one of this column’s favourite themes, every welfare policy has unintended consequences. Any benefit, however it is drawn up, will miss some people who deserve it and reward some who do not. Pointing to hard marginal cases does not invalidate a policy. Move the line and you simply create a different set of unintended consequences.
The winter fuel allowance is no exception. Pensioners are much wealthier than they were when Labour introduced it in 1997 – both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the population. As Fraser Nelson observes, pensioners’ incomes were, on average, 29 per cent below those of working-age adults in 1997; now, thanks to the triple lock, the gap has shrunk to 9 per cent.
Just as Labour is wrong to keep squeezing the revenue-generating part of the economy to expand the revenue-consuming part, so the Conservatives are wrong to keep squeezing workers to fund pensioners – especially when the ratio of workers to pensioners is falling so rapidly.
It should be a basic Tory principle that benefits are a last resort, a safety net for people who cannot rely on income, savings, or family support. If we get into the game of competitive bribery with other people’s money, we will never win. Nor, frankly, will we deserve to.