Labour smashes the “don’t mess with pensioners” rule

Nothing in politics is more painful than the removal of a benefit to which the recipients have become accustomed.

Successive Chancellors and Prime Ministers have discovered this, sometimes to their embarrassment and sometimes to their very great cost.

Related to this first rule, comes another; don’t mess with pensioners.

In fact, ‘not messing’ with them is not good enough, and most political strategists have held to the belief that pensioners must be protected at all costs – from such irritants as rising prices, tax, and economic reality.

All of which makes Labour’s modest move to slightly reduce the amount of public money hurled at pensioners even more admirable.

Pensioners are, by a considerable margin, the wealthiest group of people in the country. Not all of them, obviously, but many of them enjoy the benefits of home ownership, good pensions, plump assets and retirement income. There must be hundreds of thousands of them who don’t even notice the winter fuel allowance ping into their bank account.

Pensioners have been placed on a political pedestal since David Cameron and George Osborne cooked up the Triple Lock, which sees the state pension increase each year by either 2.5 per cent, the rate of inflation or average earnings growth, whichever is higher.

In a doomed bid to rally the ageing population to his cause, Rishi Sunak vowed to introduce the Triple Lock Plus, or Triple Lock Max, or something else that sounds like a superglue. An insufficiently large number of pensioners were wooed by this offer and Sunak lost the election, leaving the thorny issue of welfare reform to an incoming Labour government.

Means testing the winter fuel allowance is an entirely sensible policy that has provoked entirely predictable howls of outrage.

How have we got to a point where proposing that a benefit only be paid to those who need it is met with such a wall of opposition? If Labour strategists are even remotely serious about undertaking any further reforms, they should search for an answer to that question.

They should also face up to the fact that their reforms to the winter fuel allowance will save around £1bn a year, which is less than a drop in the ocean when viewed alongside the long term fiscal challenges this country actually faces.