Winter fuel payment

[twiddlingthumbs69]

Sorry if there’s already a thread on this, I couldn’t find it.

has it become clear yet on who will now get it and who won’t or is it still up in the air!

As I understand it everybody on State Pension will get it.

But if your income is above a limit, I've seen around £35k mentioned, it'll be recovered via your tax code in the same way Child Benefit is for higher earners.

I saw it mentioned £37k per household rather than person

Thank you

That's interesting, hadn't heard that limit. I did think that it should be limited to basic rate tax payers only but administratively hard to do.

Person sounds easier to do than household for administering it, household sounds more complicated. We shall see.

They could've done this really easily in the first place by saying anyone who was on the higher rate of tax wouldn't get it.

Could still be tricky as one person in household could be above and one below.

I hope you can say you don't want it if you are above the cut off, we get around £23k/£17k pension so would be over in the household scenario. I don't want to be filling in SA forms each year if I don't have to, I don't know how they would do it by household without form filling. I also have a very small pension which I haven't used, I guess that is only counted if I draw some of it down

Will be interesting to see how the devils in the administrative detail of this are dealt with.

The tax system - see the Child Benefit charge - has avoided looking at household income in spite of the gross unfairness of a couple each on £49k compared to the same total income from a single earner.

Benefits - Universal Credit - on the other hand require couples to claim jointly and they're assessed on combined assets and income.

On combined income we miss it by a mile as I have both a generous DB pension and I work 24hrs/week.OH though has only the State Pension and a meagre occupational pension.