Winter Fuel Payments worth up to £600 will no longer be guaranteed for all recipients of Pension Credit and some means-tested benefits, as the list grows
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefits shake-up under Rachel Reeves’ new plan has been laid bare, with warnings that Winter Fuel Payments of up to £600 will be honed in on those most in need.
Only those on Pension Credit and certain means-tested benefits will be in line for the Winter Fuel Payments. This spells bad news for recipients of Attendance Allowance, Bereavement Support Payment, Carer’s Allowance, Disability Living Allowance, New style Employment and Support Allowance, Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and State Pension, who’ll be left out in the cold this winter.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has backed Reeves’ right to be miffed, pointing out some truly “shocking” details about the financial legacy she’s dealing with. Its director, Paul Johnson, said: “Rachel Reeves is within her rights to feel somewhat aggrieved. It was always clear and obvious that the spending plans she inherited were incompatible with Labour’s ambitions for public services, and that more cash would be required eventually.
“But the extent of the in-year funding pressures does genuinely appear to be greater than could be discerned from the outside, which only adds to the scale of the problem … Nonetheless, some of the specifics are indeed shocking, and raise some difficult questions for the last government. If the scale of these overspends and spending pressures was apparent in the spring and in lots of cases, there’s no reason to suppose otherwise then it is hard to understand why they weren’t made clear or dealt with in the spring budget.
“Jeremy Hunt’s £10bn cut to national insurance looks ever less defensible. On asylum costs, the decision to effectively stop processing claimants, and to budget virtually nothing for the resultant costs of housing them, looks like very poor policy making. The new chancellor is right to be cross.”, reports Birmingham Live.
The Resolution Foundation stated: “Today’s assessment looked only at spending pressures in the current year, but many of these, including the extra spending on public sector pay (£9.4bn), will continue throughout this parliament. As a result, even after today’s new cuts to public spending, the foundation notes that the chancellor faces a huge challenge to bring down public sector debt without cutting unprotected departmental spending by more than the £18bn a year already pencilled in to the government finances or adding to the £23bn a year tax rises announced by the previous government that have not yet come into force.
“The chancellor’s challenge in the autumn budget will become even more severe if she wishes to maintain even modest fiscal buffers or if bad news about the growth or interest rates materialise in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR’s) autumn budget forecasts. If the OBR was to mark down its forecast for trend productivity growth by just 0.2 percentage points, it would blow a further £17bn hole in the public finances.
“The foundation warns that, when delivering the autumn budget, the government must continue to prioritise its growth ‘mission’ and focus on increasing living standards. Today’s announcements included cuts to some transport investment and £1.5bn cuts to winter fuel payments. If this approach was repeated at the Autumn Budget, this would both hamper growth, and damage living standards.”
