Keir Starmer has been talking a lot about “tough decisions” since he became prime minister this summer. For some of his MPs, tough decisions came almost immediately – with a vote on the two-child benefit cap. Seven Labour MPs who rebelled against the party line and voted to scrap the cap found they had the whip removed.
Then the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced another controversial “tough decision”: the winter fuel payment paid to all pensioners to help with their heating bills was to be axed. The Guardian’s senior political correspondent Peter Walker says when MPs returned to their constituency over the summer they were left in little doubt of how worried it had left pensioners who were struggling to make ends meet.
It set the scene for a tense vote in parliament and Helen Pidd went along to see how the day would unfold. To begin with, she spoke to the MP Rachael Maskell, who explained that, in her central York constituency, older people are so upset about potentially losing the payment they have been “stopping me in the street, grabbing my arm and saying: ‘Please help – because it’s my lifeline.’”
She listened to impassioned debates and also spoke to Charlotte Nichols, the MP for Warrington North, who said, while she had been worried about the scrapping of the universal allowance, she understood that it was not fair that pensioners who were better off were getting extra money for heating. She also said she was reassured that the rise in the state pension would make up for the lost allowance for many pensioners, and she would be voting for the motion.
Yet after the vote passed, with 52 abstentions from Labour MPs and only one voting against the government, Peter told Helen the policy may still cause problems for the party. And one MP told Helen she felt sick at the thought of how it would impact the most vulnerable.
Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA
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