Former Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard on why he voted with the SNP
Last week I did something I have never done before. I voted with the SNP government against the official position of my party. I did not do it lightly and I will explain why.
The vote was to call on the Labour government in Westminster to reverse its decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for millions of pensioners.
Of the 29,000 people in Falkirk who received the payment last year, 7400 were aged over 80.
We know that the oldest pensioners are the poorest and that many of them are women who were denied access to an occupational pension and are on low basic state pensions.
Across the UK around nine out of 10 pensioners will lose the payment: that is 900,000 in Scotland, including more than a quarter of a million who are living in fuel poverty, according to Age Scotland.
The latest figures published in February this year show that 29 per cent of pensioner households in Falkirk live in fuel poverty: that’s 8,000, and with hikes in energy bills coming in that number will rise even higher.
I have heard people argue that wealthy pensioners do not need the payment. And that is of course true. But I’ve never shied away from making the case for measures like a tax on wealth. That is the best way to address wealth inequality, not removing this annual assistance.
Maintaining the winter fuel allowance as a universal payment is the only way to guarantee that everyone who needs it will get it.
Besides, means testing is inefficient. It costs at least five times as much to administer than a universal payment.
And we know that around a third of pensioners who are eligible for pension credit do not claim it. This is for a range of reasons, but research by the trade union Unite estimates that if every pensioner who is eligible for pension credit claimed it, it would more than wipe out the proposed saving on winter fuel payments.
There is no moral case for this move and the economic case does not stack up.
The policy is wrong and should be reversed.