Winter is Coming
And it’s going to be cold.
This matter of winter-fuel payments. A handy case study.
[Writing this from memory because tedious inevitability doesn’t do it for me.]
In her first budget, the incoming UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, cancelled the annual winter-fuel payment of £300 to UK pensioners. The payment was intended to help old people keep warm through Winter; cancelling it was not a popular move.
That budget happened in Autumn; that Winter’s payments were not made. The cancellation was immediate.
Since then, winter-fuel payments have become this government’s student tuition fees [Liberal Democrats pledged no increase in tuition fees, got into government, increased tuition fees, got wiped out at the next election].
So the Prime Minister stood up, a day or two back, and produced some verbiage about how some old people did need help with their winter-fuel bills, the government had listened, etc., etc., was generous, blah, blah, so old people who needed winter-fuel payments would get them again.
He didn’t actually say: we will reverse the cancellation. Just that needy old people, emphasis on needy, would get them.
So now we’re mired in speculation about how the government is going to set up an unwieldy bureaucratic expensively omni-shambolic department aimed at spending money to set up feasibility studies to work out how best to ensure that old people who can afford their fuel bills don’t get any extra money.
Because those headlines would be dreadful. Never mind granny and grampa; perish the thought that fat cats might get government money!
It’s now May. We’re moving into Summer. Just this morning, I heard on the news that the government may not get its winter-fuel payment system up and running in time for this Winter.
A classic case study.
