The UK government announced last week that it's going to scrap the universal winter fuel payment.
This will mean 10M pensioners will no longer get it, only those in receipt of pension credit will now be entitled.
This means only around 2.5 million will continue receiving the winter fuel payments....
The problem with this is the additional couple of million pensioners who fall just above the Pension Credit threshold, who will genuinely struggle to heat their homes this coming winter!
We need to include More pensioners...
Personally I don't think several pensioners should be in receipt of the winter fuel payment, it should not be universal...
The average income for pensioners in the UK is £387 a week, or just over £20K a year. The very wealthy at the top skew this a little, but only slightly so that means at least 40% of pensioners have an income of > £20K. These figures are after housing costs!
Now granted a few of these will be living in poorly insulated houses, so their heating bills will be higher, but for the most part the comfortably well off will live in reasonable standard accommodation.
So we have around 4.5 million pensioners, ball park figure, who legitimately need this payment, and slightly more who don't IMHO.
A middle way....
The government needs to find a middle way with this that includes those above the Pension Credit Threshold....
That means including an additional 2M pensioners roughly, IMO!
£600 million to solve the problem would be a bargain.
Surely we are capable of coming up with a solution to this problem that includes the additional 2.5 million in the second quintile of pensioners by income but excludes the top 60%...?
The Winter Fuel Payments cost the government £2 billion a year, so if we exclude 60% then with current figures around £1.2 billion is going to people who simply don't need it.
So presumably if a company game along and offered a solution for £600 million a year that'd still be a £600 million annual saving!
I mean how difficult can it be to build some kind of app that does the following:
- Extract income data from HMRC.
- Auto pay everyone who falls below the £20K threshold (or whatever you want to set the threshold at)
- Set up an auto-challenge or auto apply for anyone missed out.
- Pay 1000 people to do manual checking for the more complex cases (500 people at £20K would = £10 million a year). If each of those could check just 5 cases a day that'd be around 600K checks a year. So that's insane overkill on the wages estimate. I mean for the first year you could quadruple the staff to cover EVERYONE!
- As an optional extra allow some flex in the above so you can change the income thresholds, if we have a very cold winter for example!
Final thoughts...
The govt. ain't thinking straight!
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