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Downing Street has ruled out reversing cuts to the winter fuel allowance for 10mn pensioners, despite senior Labour figures blaming the policy for the party’s setbacks in local elections in England last week.
Many Labour MPs have said that their party suffered council losses while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK made gains in Thursday’s elections because of welfare changes, in particular the winter fuel payment cuts.
But the government on Tuesday insisted it was not planning either a softening or an abandonment of the policy, which chancellor Rachel Reeves last year presented as an attempt to plug the fiscal “black hole” left by the previous Conservative government.
“There will not be any change to the government policy,” Number 10 said.
Baroness Eluned Morgan, Wales’s first minister and leader of Welsh Labour, broke ranks on Tuesday to urge Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to change course on the policy as well as on reforms to other benefits that will hit people with disabilities.
“The cut in winter fuel allowance is something that comes up time and again, and I hope the UK government will rethink this policy,” Morgan said in a speech in Cardiff.
She added that other welfare reforms set out by the UK government were “causing serious concern here, where we have a higher number of people dependent on disability benefits than elsewhere”.
Mike Amesbury, former MP for Runcorn and Helsby, which Labour lost to Reform by just six votes last week, said the government had made too many political mistakes.
“Winter fuel is an obvious one, but coming down the line is the personal independence payments,” he said, referring to a key disability benefit.
Amesbury, who resigned his seat after he was convicted of punching a constituent, called on current MPs to tell Labour’s leadership to listen to the electorate and “think again on this”.
Luke Tryl, executive director of More in Common UK, a polling group, said the cut to winter fuel payments — which will save about £1.5bn a year — was the government’s most unpopular policy and had by far the “highest cut-through” to the public.
Labour MP Louise Haigh, who was a cabinet minister until the winter, has urged Starmer to drop the government’s self-imposed fiscal rules and raise taxes to pay for a “serious programme of investment”.
But Downing Street said the cuts to the subsidy were an essential part of ministers’ attempts to stabilise the public finances.
“It was a difficult decision to means test winter fuel payments, but it was what we had to do to restore economic stability and prepare the public finances,” Number 10 said. “And it is only by government taking difficult decisions to prioritise economic stability that we are able to do policy . . . such as the [pensions] triple lock.”
Health secretary Wes Streeting told the BBC that while many voters “aren’t happy” with the cut, it would free up government spending for other public services.
