Council back Save Winter Fuel Allowance petition
Skegness Town Council is backing the ‘Save the Winter Fuel Payment’ petition being run by Age UK and calling on Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, to reconsider the Government decision to axe the payment.
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00:00Stettings Town Council is committed to signing this Save the Winterfjord Pavement for Struggling
00:06Pensioners petition, which is being run by Age Concern.
00:10This really brings in light both the District Council and the County Council, who have already
00:17gone along, excuse me while I'm issuing the transition, I believe they've already gone
00:24along these lines. I mean obviously the removal of the Winterfjord allowance is a really,
00:32really bad policy. Now I fully understand that people say well it actually, it's only
00:38the vulnerable, it's only the vulnerable pensioners that are actually going to, that
00:47are not going to be affected by this because the vulnerable pensioners are only getting
00:53pension credits. However, what else it will do is it will create another level of vulnerability
01:04because if you are just over the cut-off, which I think is about £11,450, if you are
01:14only £11,600, you cannot get pension credit. So what's actually happened is somebody that
01:28gets pension credit will have £11,450 up to and then it will have £300 on top of
01:38that, so they'll actually have £11,750. Whereas somebody that's got £11,600, they
01:45will have £11,900 but they are actually now having less money than somebody on pension
01:54credits and it really doesn't make any sense. The motion in front of us is as read and I
02:06hope the council will back this motion because I do think we need to make, we need to give
02:14as much support to our elderly people in this town as possible. Maybe I should declare an
02:20interest being a pensioner myself but I mean that's something. The other thing I'd like
02:29to say is with us being a seaside resort, our elderly population is well over the mean
02:41average for a normal, for want of a better word, community. When I was a practice manager
02:49at a medical practice, we would be running at between 140 and 160% of the actual mean
03:03average we should have based on the statistics. So please back this and thank you very much.
03:13Is there a seconder?
03:15Yes, I'll hold on to the seconder's motion and reserve a lot of the right to speak if
03:21they want to speak now.
03:23Anyone want to speak?
03:25We don't want to be heard.
03:27Anyone want to speak?
03:29I'm supporting the council over there. We know that the government said that there's
03:37this huge gap in the budget and they needed to fill it by making cuts. Now if those figures
03:45are correct, then obviously you've got to make some financial adjustment. But I do feel
03:51that they could have looked at some area of expenditure which was less sensitive. It's
03:57ironic, isn't it, that this particular measure was introduced by the last Labour government
04:03but by Gordon Brown and then there's a gap of some 14 years and then the current government
04:09decides to get rid of it. I think that, as Councillor O'Dea has pointed out, any blanket
04:19sort of measure that the government puts, there's bound to be inequality in it. But
04:23I do feel that we all live in this area. There are a good many people that, as Councillor
04:31O'Dea said, are hovering on that limit. We now know that the fuel tax went up by 10
04:41per cent so that's further going to turn the ratchet, so to speak. I think that the motion
04:47presented here, it states it all and I would hope that colleagues around this table would
04:55support it because there's organisations such as Age UK, they support it. It's not necessarily
05:03just our council. I mean, everybody's going to be affected to some degree on this and
05:09I think if, and also, let's face it, there's been tremendous support from every government
05:13that have expressed reservations about this particular thing so it's not, there is a
05:19grand sum of people that think that the whole measure would not fall through so that's why
05:25I'm supporting Councillor O'Dea.