As temperatures fall below freezing, 750,000 of the poorest pensioners look set to miss out on help with their heating this winter.

Labour have known this all along. In public, they say they want everyone who’s eligible for Pension Credit to sign up. But the savings they’ve banked were always based on a third of the poorest pensioners missing out.

Pension Credit is notoriously underclaimed. You can be entitled to it even if you’ve never had government support before, and lots of older people find it hard to ask for help.

The system has also been thrown into chaos, with applications now taking ten weeks to process. That means if you applied on the Government’s 21st December deadline, you wouldn’t receive any support until March. What good is that over the winter?

If you’re giving the government the benefit of the doubt, you’d call this gross incompetence. At worst, it is wilful cruelty to a group which doesn’t typically vote Labour.

When my grandma was in her 90s I remember visiting her in the winter. She would sit by a heater all day wrapped up in layers of jumpers, and still feeling deeply cold. When older people feel the cold in the winter it’s not just ‘I’m feeling a bit chilly’. It can mean not getting out of bed all day. It can mean getting ill and ending up in hospital.

The Government has said over and over that this won’t happen. But earlier this month they admitted that 100,000 pensioners will be plunged into poverty as a direct result.

Keir Starmer dresses this up as a decision he had to take, one he has been forced into. He blames everyone other than himself. But it’s about time he faces the facts and starts taking responsibility for his political choices.

Cutting the winter fuel payment from pensioners will save the government around £1.4 billion. Setting up Labour’s new energy quango alone will cost roughly six times that. Axing our plans to cut the civil service headcount will cost roughly the same.

Not to mention the billions Starmer shelled out on no-strings-attached, inflation-busting pay rises for his union paymasters.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves didn’t mention any of this when they were courting your vote in sunny July. They didn’t give the slightest hint about their plans to freeze out pensioners, and they repeatedly claimed that they had ‘no plans’ to make this very change.

How could you ever trust them again?

Helen Whately is the shadow work and pensions secretary