The Conservative motion to defeat Labour’s planned cut to the winter fuel payment for all but the poorest pensioners failed this afternoon, defeated by 348 votes to 228. There were 53 abstentions, many of which were due to absences. A single Labour MP, Jon Trickett, rebelled.
The vote was a useful test of the strength for Labour’s majority. The cut to a benefit for around ten million pensioners, announced in July in response to a Treasury audit that found a £22bn hole in current spending, was no-one’s idea of fun. The policy was launched as a grim necessity and has had plenty of time to sour in the minds of the public. Opposition MPs have had time to receive letters from worried constituents; economists have had time to model their own predictions for the impact of the policy.
Most persuasive among these arguments was a forecast from the former Liberal Democrat pensions minister, Steve Webb, that the cut would apply to five out of six pensioners beneath the poverty line. Groups such as the Fuel Poverty Coalition have rightly warned that a rise in excess deaths could result. In an impassioned debate in the Commons this afternoon, many of these concerns were raised, but in the end this could not change the result.
This was not a victory but proof that the Conservatives cannot rely on parliamentary arithmetic to undermine the government, even when it is pursuing a policy that worries millions of constituents and which many of its own MPs quietly oppose.
It may also be that despite the emotive debate over winter fuel, MPs and the public are also thinking more about the wider picture. The payment has not actually changed since 2000, meaning that it has already been cut by 45 per cent in real terms. This cut has gone unremarked, probably because pensioners – as the main beneficiaries of fiscal policy in the past decade – have become better off, with their median income rising by 38 per cent over the same period, relative to a 19 per cent rise for the rest of us (according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies). For those pensioners in poverty, the key problems – the cost of energy, rent and food, the availability of social care and GP appointments – are much wider and more complex; a single £200-a-year payment was never going to solve them.
The Budget (30 October) will no doubt contain measures that are still more likely to incur difficult headlines. The lesson from today is that this is a moment to get things done: Labour has the numbers to push through legislation, and there seems to be an acceptance in the party, and the country, that the fiscal position requires aggressive and unpopular decisions. It’s a bleak little honeymoon, but not without opportunity.
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