The choice? Heating or eating

By Chris Watt

As the ConDem coalition reaches 100 days in office, we learn that their welfare review will look at abolishing winter fuel payments for all pensioner households. This policy, introduced by Labour, deserves to be defended; its abolition would be misguided for two fundamental reasons.

Firstly, the idea is to reduce the cost of the system, but the universal system is cheap and simple to administer. Making it means-tested would involve a massive increase in the bureaucratic cost of the system, as forms are processed and assessments of eligibility made.

Secondly, and more importantly, many of those pensioner households who rely on the payments to keep warm every winter would lose out. Many would simply not fill in the form in order to claim if it was means tested.

The coalition argues that by removing the payments for those on higher incomes, it would save the cost of paying those who can afford their bills. However, many, especially those who would inevitably only just miss out under a means test, would fall into fuel poverty.

This would happen because fuel poverty is measured not only on income, but on how much it takes to heat the household. Without the requisite increase in funding to improve the energy efficiency of some of our worst housing, we could see increasing numbers of our elderly being faced with a choice between heating and eating each winter.