It takes a big government to admit that it was wrong – or, at the very least, an extremely frightened one. One of the first big policies introduced by Rachel Reeves, less than four weeks after becoming Chancellor, was to change the winter fuel payment, meant to help pensioners heat their homes, from a universal benefit to a means-tested one. Ten months in, it may be her first big U-turn, too.
The cut was not ridiculous idea in theory. Between the triple lock on the state pension and a Tory party that knew where its new base was to be found, pensioners had done relatively well out of the previous government, and were spared many of the tax rises or ballooning housing costs that had landed on the young. A sizable chunk of the cohort – 80 per cent, according to one former care minister – did not actually need the winter fuel payment, and now there was a black hole in the public finances. Not unreasonable, surely, to ask a relatively wealthy and well-housed generation to do their bit to help plug it? After all, we’re all in this together.
Alas, policies that look reasonable in the spreadsheets and briefing notes of Whitehall sometimes detonate on contact with electoral reality. The policy as implemented didn’t merely strip the payment from the objectively rich, but from any pensioner on over £11,500 a year. Labour’s polling collapsed; backbenchers rebelled; the policy came under fire from everyone from Martin Lewis to the TUC. A Labour MP was forced to resign from the board of the Gateshead branch of Age UK; to the delight of certain newspapers, a thief avoided jail on the grounds he’d done no worse than Keir Starmer.
Then came the local elections, in which the governing party did worse than already rock bottom expectations, and where one of the main complaints was its failure to address the cost of living crisis. And now, would you believe it? No 10 is reported to be rethinking. “It comes up on the doorstep all the time,” one unnamed Cabinet minister told the Guardian. “Winter fuel will lose us the next election, it was a terrible mistake.”
Some kind of reversal is clearly warranted: heating bills are a lot higher than they were, and £11,500 is a fairly bracing idea of a decent living allowance, even for a group largely spared housing costs. (The minimum wage, by way of comparison, works out to around twice that.) Reversing a policy that might single handedly lose the next election seems a no-brainer.
But it is illuminating to compare the reaction to this welfare cut to the others. Unnamed government spokespeople have made clear, repeatedly, there will be no rethink of the two-child benefit cap, even though it is a matter of undisputed fact that it pushes families into poverty. The same Guardian story which suggests the winter fuel policy is under review contains talk of more cuts to disability benefits and other bits of the welfare budget – and while it’s not true to suggest such cuts will bring no outcry, this, unlike the one concerning payments for the elderly, is one that ministers think they can withstand. This is odd, in some was: do impoverished families not need to heat their homes, too?
There are a number of possible reasons the electorate, and our leaders, might think the elderly should qualify for special treatment. One is that our conception of who has money is simply out of date. In most societies, for most of history, old age did bring a hefty risk of poverty. Even if a smaller proportion of old people in today’s UK are in poverty than children – even if they’re far less likely to be at the sharp end of the housing crisis to boot – it doesn’t feel true.
Allied to that is the fact that, for many older people, their pension and benefit entitlements is all there is. Younger welfare claimants can still, in theory, change their circumstances by returning to the workforce or finding better paid jobs, however unlikely that actually is in practice. Beyond a certain age, one cannot. And most of us, surely, have known a frail loved one, or imagine we will grow old. Perhaps it’s just easier to imagine a reduction in benefits for the elderly as an attack on us.
All this, though, may be looking for a complexity that does not exist. We all know the birth rates have been falling, and the boomer generation has hit retirement age: all that means, to be blunt, that there is a higher population of older people than ever before, and they vote. The winter fuel allowance is hardly the only untouchable benefit on offer to this electorally powerful cohort: witness Medicare in the otherwise publicly-funded healthcare averse US, or free TV licences here in the UK.
These things, though, are among the smaller results of the long-promised demographic time bomb detonating at last. In a world where an ageing population means soaring healthcare budgets, flatlining productivity and a form of conservative politics more concerned with culture than with growth, a few free goodies here and there hardly seem worth worrying about.
[See more: The dangerous relationship]
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