When chancellor Rachel Reeves cruelly axed the Winter Fuel Payment she tried to soften the blow for the very poorest pensioners by pledging to boost uptake of state benefit Pension Credit.
Your last chance to claim the Winter Fuel Payment for this year has just expired (Image: Getty)
That window of opportunity has now gone and it’s a bleak outlook for the huge number of pensioners who won’t benefit from her pledge.
Pension Credit is a means-tested top-up that lifts a single person income’s to £218.15 a week or £332.95 for couples.
A successful claim acts as a gateway to an additional £3,900 in additional state support, including help with heating costs, council tax and housing benefit.
Crucially, only people who can claim Pension Credit now get the Winter Fuel Payment, worth up to £300 a year.
In a desperate bid to quell fury over her decision to scrap the payout, Reeves said she’d launch a campaign getting more people to claim Pension Credit.
That was a necessity as around 760,000 cash-strapped pensioners who were entitled to receive Pension Credit weren’t claiming in March last year.
Reeves said she would put it right. But now the deadline has fallen on her efforts.
Yesterday was the last chance to file a claim Pension Credit for the ‘qualifying week’ of 16 to 22 September and secure the Winter Fuel Payment
It’s too soon to say how many claimants got in under the wire, but I can make a rough estimate based on earlier figures.
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Scrapping the Winter Fuel Payment triggered a surge in Pension Credit applications.
In September, Reeves took the credit, claiming: “We’re now seeing applications at more than 10,000 a week, they were around 3,000 a week previously.”
I’m not sure that’s much to boast about. It merely shows just how desperate people were to get help with their heating bills as winter loomed.
Also, there’s a big difference between claiming Pension Credit and actually getting it.
While Reeves celebrated a rush of claims, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was busily rejecting half of them.
Between April and December 1, only 91,000 out of 183,000 Pension Credit applications were successful, according to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
In the first eight weeks since Reeves announced she was axing the Winter Fuel Payment on 29 July, around 74,400 claimed.
That’s 9,300 a week.
Now let’s say only half were successful. That’s 4,650 a week or 37,200 over that eight-week spell to September 16.
That left just over 13 weeks before the December 31 deadline, which may suggest another 60,450 successful claims.
These are back-of-fag-packet calculations but it’s the best I can do. Presumably, we won’t get the official DWP figures for weeks or months.
They tell a stark story though.
Even if an extra 60,000 pensioners did claim, it still leaves around 700,000 of the very poorest missing out on Pension Credit.
That’s an awful lot of pensioners who are going to find it even harder to heat their homes and put food on the table this winter.
The idea that Reeves would dramatically drive up Pension Credit uptake was for the birds. The DWP has been making half-hearted efforts for years.
In reality, Reeves has condemned a lot more than 700,000 pensioners to cold, hard winter.
Some 2.5million are just above the Pension Credit deadline but still lack enough income to live a dignified life. That’s a staggering one in four.
They may be on just a little over £11,350 a year, but have still lost their Winter Fuel Payment.
Most are actually a lot poorer than those who do get Pension Credit, because they miss out on that £3,900 in additional support.
They face a terrifying winter knowing they won’t get that cash. The claims deadline passed yesterday. Today, the bitter reality is sinking in.
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