To say the £35k winter fuel threshold is way too high!

[chocolateismyweakness4]

The threshold needed to be raised, but £35k?! I wish I earned that and I have a mortgage and commuting costs. It also doesn’t take into account savings (so they could have millions in the bank) or household income.

We all know it’s a bribe, but they still won’t get pensioners to vote for them.

It’s not per household, it’s per person on state pension. My mum lives with us and got the WFA last year because she is on pension credit. When l queried it l was told its individual income, not total household income.

I think you know perfectly well what this poster means. I certainly do.

You mean just as they in turn have paid for the pensions of the generation before them ? That’s how it works.

After all the comments and viewpoints on this long thread, my conclusion is that the state pension should just be higher and so this quite measly but seemingly highly controversial handout is just built in. From a cursory search of pension levels in Europe there are about 15 other countries paying more than the UK. Very poor.

people get to retirement with what they have managed to accumulate over their pre retirement life. Some good. Some not so. Some with houses paid in full. Some not. But when you are past a certain age, you can’t just work more or change jobs or whatever. Ageing comes to all of us. Speaking personally, I had no money for any holiday, eating out, a washing machine, new furniture, etc for several years after getting married. I was overdrawn and had to take out loans for stuff. Mortgage was priority (yes at a high %). My taxes at that stage were paying for my grandmothers generation pension. She, in turn, had saved what she could so her pension years were OK. She worked her socks off cleaning and what not when she worked.
Why would I, as a young, fit, able woman in my twenties, moan about my lot and that I was struggling while my granny was doing ok? Why the hell should I as a young person NOT have some struggle or doing without until I had worked enough to benefit from what I had achieved? I don’t remember whinging about going to the laundrette every week cos I couldn’t afford a machine and blame that my taxes were contributing to pensioners. That would surely have made me quite an entitled so and so!

As for life choices. If choosing not to have children is a life choice then of course choosing to have them is a life choice. Nothing wrong with either, but no one is forced into having kids. Each to their own!

So up the pension. Equalise taxation so that income from savings and other stuff is taxed same as income (which would higher taxes on anyone with such assets yes including pensioner) oh and get all those huge companies that pay minimum wages where their employees have to claim tax credits and such like, to have to repay these where their profits exceed a certain amount. If we’re going to talk about younger people being on shit wages, the benefits in kind these companies get from the government - effectively contributing to their profits - would surely be better to target than a measly 200 wfa.

As is the amount of money paid in maternity benefits, child benefit, nursery fees, SEND funding etc. All of which is expected by parents, despite the fact that it was the current generation of pensioners who paved the way for these things.

I think changing demographics means that there is now much more to pay.

But not the fault of those involved - it’s the way the system works.

Makes me feel poor reading this. I get a LOT less than half of that.

Coming to this thread late. WFA is not a huge amount, but it does surprise me that they haven’t set the cut off point lower.

It seems that there will be an unnecessary transfer of funds to people who don’t need it, when there isn’t much money around.

I don’t think it’s even necessarily about young and old as I expect that in many cases the money will effectively be passed on to other family members.

Except it doesn’t really work any more.

That’s not how to work out a cut off though.

Seems like a sensible level to me. Like the £80k cutoff for receiving child benefit, the point of the cutoff being high is that no matter where the cutoff is, there will always be boohoo sadface publicity about the tragic circumstances of person X whose income is just above the cutoff and is losing out. It's really important from gov't pov that those sadfaces get either ignored or ridiculed because their income is plenty.

There is no more entitled demographic than pensioners.

As a reminder they have been effectively insulated from the cost of living crisis through the triple lock (the state pension went up when inflation spiked, then went up again when earnings increased at a later date to compensate).

The winter fuel allowance was only introduced in 1997, so for most the working lives of current pensioners they were never taxed to pay for it for others.

They get all sorts of medical treatments and drugs, expensive medical treatments and drugs, that simply weren’t available when they were working taxpayers. And that’s before we get to the fact there was a much higher ratio of working age people to retired people so the cost of government support was spread over a larger base.

Finally, they voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, further ruining the lives of the generations that follow them.

The point is the ratio of working to retired people was much higher, so it was significantly less of a burden on them. It’s completely disingenuous to claim this is simply the same now for working people as it was then. See my post above.

That’s odd because I worked for 20 years after 1997. I don’t take any medication at all and voted Remain. I don’t recognise my life or anyone I know in that post.

The cut off for child benefit is £80,000. Significantly higher than. The £35,000 for WFA.

This. MN hates pensioners - especially boomers. Blaming them for many things that were beyond their control.

I don’t think the vast majority of pensioners have millions in the bank. Very few, in fact.

How is this the fault of the pensioners involved ? What do you think they could have done about it and what would you have done in their position ?

Paul Lewis has pointed out that a pensioner with £1m in the bank with only the interest and their pension would qualify!
It’s nuts!

I’ll tell you one thing I wouldn’t do: expect the current working taxpayers to pay for benefits that I never paid for, and whine about it the whole time.

child benefit isn’t a great comparator as it’s also really unfair, particularly to lone parents.

You try living £230 a week, no private pension so thats the only income.

That’s not what the vast majority of pensioners do either.

Share a more equal part of the tax burden.

For instance do we really still need the distinction between tax and NI?

Is there a better way to tax assets?