Could Labour be about to water down its removal of the winter fuel payment for pensioners? The chorus of muttering is getting louder in the party about restricting it to those on pension credit or other means-tested benefits, with backbenchers saying they have been shocked by the volume of letters from pensioners about it. This week, Rachael Maskell called on the government to think again about the policy after the new energy price cap went up, and now Harriet Harman has intervened with her own suggestion. Baroness Harman politely offered a compromise in which ‘they decide to make a different cut-off point’.
Harman doesn’t tend to criticise her party in public: she always tries to take a positive line about its leadership or stays quiet. So her intervention is significant and reflects the growing disquiet in Labour. But some of that disquiet in turn reflects quite how shocked Labour MPs are by the simple reality that governing is very hard and people rarely thank you for it. Senior figures who actually remember the last time Labour was in power have been concerned by the way backbenchers, new and more established, seem discombobulated by this realisation.
Senior figures who actually remember the last time Labour was in power have been concerned by the way backbenchers, new and more established, seem discombobulated by this realisation.
The problem with Harman’s suggestion on the winter fuel payment is that by changing the cut off so that it doesn’t follow pension credit and benefits, you lower the savings. Rachel Reeves wants to save £1.4bn annually, but a separate means test for the benefit will eat into that – and of course giving the payment to more households than the Chancellor originally intended will cost the government more too. The cost and complexity of means testing has long been one of the pragmatic arguments against abolishing the universality of the winter fuel payment.
If the Tories pray against the change to the payment and force a vote on the secondary legislation, then Keir Starmer will have to work out how to deal with the disquiet in his party. When MPs were upset about the two child benefit limit remaining, the Labour leader took two approaches. One was to announce a child poverty task force, and the other was to threaten rebels with the removal of the Labour whip, which he duly did for seven of them. Concerns about this benefit have a similar broad base across the Labour Party as the two child limit, but might yet manifest themselves in just a handful of actual rebels, depending on how effectively the Prime Minister manages to argue to his MPs that they need to stick with his plan even through uncomfortable votes. There are going to be many more far less palatable decisions that the government has to take this autumn, so Starmer will have to find a method for dealing with this kind of disquiet regularly, including helping his MPs come to terms with the reality that government can often be pretty thankless.
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