Unite begins legal action to stop winter fuel cuts

Unite is pushing ahead with its legal action against the government in a bid to overturn cuts to the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners.

The union - one of Labour's biggest funders - claims ministers did not follow correct procedure in their decision to restrict the payments to poorer pensioners.

Sharon Graham, Unite's general secretary, told the BBC "picking the pockets of pensioners is wrong at every level".

The government says it cannot comment on the legal action, but it was committed to supporting pensioners.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the policy, announced in July, is necessary to repair a "hole" in the public finances left by the previous government.

Winter fuel payment is a lump-sum amount of £200 a year for pensioners under 80, increasing to £300 for over 80s, paid in November or December.

From this winter, it will be restricted to those who qualify for pension credit and other means-tested help, meaning an estimated 10 million pensioners will no longer be eligible to receive it.

Among those are 200,000 Unite members, and the union says it is acting on behalf of retired members struggling to get by.

It says many of them have modest private pensions, making them ineligible for pension credit.

Juliet Jeater is one of 11 Unite members who have joined the union's legal action.

She told the BBC she believed the pension credit threshold was too low, and to qualify for it "you truly have to be on the breadline".

Ms Jeater, a retired teacher in her seventies who lives in a Northamptonshire village, said she needed the winter fuel payment to pay for heating her cottage.

In the recent cold snap, she was given scrap wood from a neighbour, who is a scaffolder, to heat her home.

A former Labour member who joined the Green Party, Ms Jeater said she was surprised to find herself better off under the last Conservative government.

She said: "I feel quite angry about what has happened.

"Last year when we had a Conservative government, I actually received £500, which was the winter fuel allowance plus a cost-of-living payment.

"This year I get nothing."

Unite claims the government should have done more to gather evidence on the impact of the cuts before announcing them.

The union threatened to take legal action earlier this month, unless the government cancelled the cuts or produced more evidence for them.

Now, it has instructed lawyers who are asking the High Court for an urgent judicial review of the policy.

The government did undertake a limited "equality analysis" of the policy, which was disclosed to MPs last week and revealed an estimated 50,000 people could fall into relative poverty next year as a result of the change.

Ministers say this figure does not take account of its ongoing drive to increase the take-up of pension credit among an estimated 880,000 eligible pensioners not currently claiming it.

But the union says this falls short of a full impact assessment, which would also take the effect on older people’s health into account .

The union has also claimed that the independent Social Security Advisory Committee should have been consulted in advance.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has argued she had to act urgently to bring in the necessary regulations before winter, and to make in-year savings in government spending.

Ms Graham told the BBC the government had "brought something in without knowing what it is going to cost in terms of illness, what it is going to cost in terms of death".

Asked why she was backing potentially costly legal action, she said: ‘"What I want is for the courts to hear this quickly, and to say if the proper impact assessment wasn’t done, then actually the government needs to go back to the beginning and in the interim, they need to pay the winter fuel allowance for this year".

Otherwise, she argued that "people will not forgive Labour’s decision".

"This issue is not going away," she added.

Official figures released on Thursday showed there has been a rise in the number of people applying for pension credit since the decision in July to link it to the winter fuel payment.

About 150,000 people applied for the top-up in the 16 weeks following the announcement, compared to 61,300 in the 16 weeks before.

The government has said that it can not comment on ongoing legal action, but that pensions will increase under the "triple-lock" uprating policy and that some pensioners will get an additional £150 warm home discount.

There is no guarantee that taking legal action will stop the cuts.

Government sources seem confident that the policy will not be reversed in the courts.

But Unite’s action once again highlights the controversy over the cuts as winter approaches.

Pressure on the government at Westminster is likely to mount further if the Scottish government were to decide to mitigate the cuts in next week’s budget.

And the cross-party Work and Pensions Committee is to start an inquiry into pensioner poverty - partly prompted by the cuts - in January.

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