Winter fuel allowance cuts could reduce pensioner poverty by raising benefit take-up, says minister – UK politics live

Starmer urges Britons in Lebanon to leave immediately

Rowena Mason

Keir Starmer has arrived at the UN general assembly where he will have various meetings on the Middle East and Ukraine, before making a speech later.

Asked for his message to Britons in Lebanon, he said they should not wait to be evacuated at a later date and should “leave and leave immediately” via commercial flights.

He said:

I am very worried about the escalation. I’m calling for all parties to step back from the brink, to de-escalate. We need a ceasefire so this can be sorted out diplomatically.

But I have a very important message for British nationals in Lebanon which is: the time to leave is now.

The contingency plans are being ramped up but don’t wait for those, there are still commercial flights. It’s very important that they hear my message, which is to leave and to leave immediately.

Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, has been named as the new editor of the Spectator magazine, weeks after the GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall completed a £100m takeover of the politically right-leaning magazine, Mark Sweney reports.

Stephen Timms, a welfare minister, has said that over time the winter fuel payment cuts could actually reduce pensioner poverty, because it is encouraging pensioners to claim pension credit.

Speaking an an interview with Radio 4’s World at One, broadcast after Labour delegates voted for a motion saying the cut should be reversed, Timms, the minister for social security and disability, said:

The chancellor has made decisions which need to be made to sort out the very serious problems in the government finances which we’ve been left with.

And I’m hoping that, over time, this measure will actually reduce pensioner poverty by increasing the take-up of pension credit.

We have seen quite a big boost in the number of people applying for pension credit over the last few weeks, and I think that is likely to continue.

The only pensioners who will continue to get the winter fuel payment, which can be worth up to £300 per household, are pensioners on pension credit, a benefit paid to those with the lowest incomes.

According to the latest government figures, only 63% of pensioners who are eligible for pension credit claim it. The government said earlier this month up to 880,000 pensioners could be missing out, and it has launched a campaign to encourage them to claim. Three weeks ago the government said applications were up 115%.

But a DWP equality impact assessment published on 13 September said that the department expected take-up to rise by just 5 percentage points. It said:

Out of the total c.10m who will lose out in the 1st year of the policy, we estimate that around 880k of these will be pensioners who would be entitled to pension credit if they claimed it, but have not done so. The modelling underpinning the policy costing assumes a 5 percentage point “loss aversion” increase in PC take-up (from 63% to 68%), reducing this to around 780k and increasing the PC caseload by around 100k.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a thinktank focusing on poverty, has said that means-testing the winter fuel payment, in the way that the government is doing, could push an extra 100,000 pensioners into poverty.

According to an analysis by Steve Webb, a former Lib Dem pensions minister, for Lane Clark and Peacock, pensions consultants, there are about 1.9 million pensioners living in relative povery. Only about 300,000 of them are getting pension credit. Of the other 1.6m, only around half of them might be eligible for pension credit, he says. He says the other 800,000 do not qualify for pension credit, but pushed below the poverty level by housing costs.

If all pensioners eligible for pension credit were to claim it, the government would not save any money from the winter fuel payment cut. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has claimed she would not mind this outome, because it would mean poorer pensioners were benefiting.

The Green party says it backs Unite’s call for the government to impose a wealth tax as an alternative to cutting the winter fuel payment. (See 11.21am.) In a statement following the Labour conference vote against the cut, Carla Denyer, the Green party’s co-leader, said:

Today’s vote at Labour party conference leaves Labour ministers out in the cold. There is a groundswell of support – from opposition parties, unions, many Labour MPs, health workers, disability groups, charities supporting pensioners, as well as others – for ensuring millions of pensioners keep warm this winter.

Targeting some of the most vulnerable to fix the supposed black hole in the public finances is cruel and unnecessary.

There is another way. A fairer way. As the successful motion by Unite makes clear, taxing multi-millionaires and billionaires a little more would not only easily cover the cost of winter fuel payments for all pensioners but also generate additional funds for much needed investment in our health and social care services.

As Phillip Inman reports, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has significantly increased its growth forecast for 2024. He explains:

Describing the UK’s economic growth as “robust”, the OECD upgraded its growth for 2024 to 1.1% from a forecast of 0.4% made in May, as the country recovers from a mild recession at the end of last year. The forecast of 1.2% growth in 2025 was maintained.

In the May forecast, the UK was behind all other nations in the informal bloc but is now expected to outpace Japan, Italy and struggling Germany. Britain is now on par with Canada and France but behind the US.

Rishi Sunak, the former PM, and Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor, have both been posting about this on X. They dispute Labour’s claim that the Conservatives left the economy in a poor state, and they argue that these figures show they left the economy in a strong state.

This is from Sunak.

Labour inherited the fastest growing economy in the G7.

But the Prime Minister and Chancellor constantly talking the economy down has already had a damaging impact on consumer and business confidence.

Time to stop playing politics and put country first, party second.

And this is from Hunt.

The OECD data today yet again shows that Labour were left a strong economic inheritance, despite their desperation to say otherwise. The Chancellor’s choices at the Budget will be hers and hers alone.

The OECD figures are about the state of the economy generally. Labour’s main complaint about the Tories has been about the state of the public finances (and the £22bn gap it claims to have found between what the Tories were planning to spend this year, and the money they had to fund this), although Labour also argues the economy has been underperforming for years.