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.

I really want to shout - I do not have huge savings , I manage on a low income and I voted remain. I have a house because we worked very hard for it.
Stop generalising - pensioners are just as varied as any other group.

And I’m still working and paying tax almost 30 years later and two years past retirement age because I’m concerned that we won’t be able to manage if I give up work. I’ve worked full time since I was 16, paying tax and NI, with just seven years as a stay at home mother to one child because we couldn’t afford more, when I got £10 a week child benefit and had no subsidised childcare; from what I remember, 15 hours of nursery provision was introduced just before my daughter was due to start school.

I also didn’t vote to leave the EU, and the only person I know of retirement age who did was my late mother - everyone else I know voted to stay and most felt as passionately about it as I did. I do take some medication, none of which is expensive, but I’ve also had to pay privately for the vast majority of the treatment I’ve had for my back problem over the last three years because of the very long NHS waiting lists, and I spent an arm and a leg on treatment and medication in my 20s and 30s for an autoimmune illness which I couldn’t get treatment for on the NHS at the time.

I really take offence at being told I’m entitled.

Exactly.

And women workers in the 60s and 70s generally earned a lot less than men and were frequently excluded from company pension schemes as our earnings didn't meet the minimum salary for entry to the scheme.

With no childcare provision we resorted to poorly paid part time jobs (evenings in my case) as we needed to be at home in the daytime to look after our children. Then when they were older find a term time only job if we could.

Couldn't afford a car, mortgage rate was 16% at one point, and for most of the mortgage term was between 8 and 15%. Lost any hope of future prosperity through the Endowment mortgage scandal.

Boomers did not all have it easy.

👏 👏👏👏👏👏

On the money. I forgot that I paid for my cataract surgery, thank you for reminding me.

I’m sure you aren’t. However I was shocked to hear that my parents (house paid off years ago, money in the bank, final salary pensions) will be entitled to the payment. This isn’t about young or old, because the money will probably be spent on the grand children. It’s about giving people money they don’t need when there isn’t much money to go round.

Shall we just kill off all the elderly people then? The ageism and ignorance on this thread is shocking. If you’re lucky you’ll be old one day, and I hope the younger generation have the same attitude towards all of those saying that pensioners are entitled or grabby. My dad is in his eighties with dementia and living in a 1 bed flat. He has some savings which is quickly being used up by the £2k per month he spends on care. Please don’t be so ignorant as to think all pensioners are living a cushy life.

Obviously they can also give the money to charity.

Rubbish, they plainly do. They complained when the WFA was means tested (introduced 1997) and complain every time the triple lock is mentioned (introduced in 2010).

Believe me if the “vast majority” of pensioners didn’t complain, both would rightly have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

They’re being kept for a reason, rather obviously.

It’s about giving people money they don’t need when there isn’t much money to go round.

We could say the same about giving households with two children and a joint income of up to £120k an extra £2.2k a year. I wouldn’t because it would be petty but some people would.

I have a lot of sympathy for the government over this (and the last one). It’s like when child benefit became means tested. How they do it is ridiculously unfair (on individual income not family) and then adding the fact that you can still claim it and then pay it back (like WF will be) - BUT that’ll be done my tax return when a lot of the people who fall into the “too high” for WF or CB payments are not high income enough to ever need to do a tax return.

It’s absurd but there is no easy way to do it, unless you’re in the benefits system and they have your household income for universal credit or pension credit reasons.

Ideally it would be on household income (both winter fuel and child benefit) and set at levels that make sense that move up automatically with inflation and you would just get it or not - no reason to fill in otherwise superfluous tax returns. But hey ho…

”They” didn’t. Some did and were wrong.

Yes, I believe it does.

My mum was a primary school teacher. When she went back part time in the early 70s my brother was still a pre-schooler. She took him to school with her for a year before he started school himself. There was no other childcare available.

What's really annoying is that the new way of "means testing" it, just makes the tax system even more complicated. It's already ridiculously complicated, and yet politicians of both colours (well all 3 because the libdems did it too!) say they want to simplify tax but invariably make it more complicated.

To add to my earlier post, my dear late DH died just months after reaching state pension age. He'd been paying since he was 15 years old, working full time without a break until 66. So 51 years of National Insurance contributions bought him 5 months of state pension.

There was no state provision for me as a widow, and having paid the 'married women's stamp' in the early years, even though I've worked since I was 15, I'm £20.00 short of the full state pension.

35k a year as a pensioner is a decent income surely? I’ve got a decent career average defined benefit pension due and would only expect it to be around 18k a year plus state pension. I expect to be ok on that. I’d be overjoyed on 34k.

A lot of employed people don’t earn that much and will have higher outgoings than a pensioner 🤷🏻‍♀️

Trouble is if they'd done it at lower income levels, it would have dragged more people into being caught by it, thus causing HMRC even more work to sift through to identify those who should be paying it back. At least at £35k there won't be huge numbers of people to be identified and sent demands to, and many of those will already be within self assessment as many will be earning far higher than that or have more complicated tax affairs (buy to lets etc) already needing to be doing self assessment returns each year.

Rather than the actual amount, I think the decision as to the threshold is based on numbers of people who'll be dragged into HMRC attention via Self assessment or similar, as some kind of "sweet spot" where the time and cost of means testing is less than the WFA saved. Too low a threshold and HMRC would need a small army of staff to deal with in. Too high a threshold and it wouldn't be worth doing.

I’ve read that 9 out of 10 pensioners will now qualify again. So what was the point? This is just going to create work for HMRC the cost of which is probably an unknown at the moment but could end up being quite a lot, who knows?

It's politics. If Rachel had given it back to everyone, she'd have been ridiculed even more than she is! As it stands, she can claim it's still a valid policy, and just "tweaked" so that the least deserving don't get it. Policy "tweaks" are better publicity wise than blatant U Turns. Don't mistakenly think it's anything other than her playing politics AGAIN!

They are giving people the option to decline it if they have sufficient income. I don't think in the current climate that £35k is a large income. And as some have said, quite a few pensioners are renting.

No other income? Are you in receipt of benefits? If so, that counts as income.

< looks at boomer DH and around our tiny SH flat and battery hen living> Im Gen X

"Don't think it's a large income"! Wow! It's only just below national average income and about 50% more than a full time worker on minimum wage earns!

For someone who isn't actually working, it's a huge amount!

Sounds a lot but if you’re a family of 4 living in an expensive area rent could be around 1£1,500+ so with bills on top it’s not that much.

My DM did the same Paid the married womens stamp