The Tories offer pensioners nothing but insecurity – Debbie Abrahams

Labour is today (Tuesday 23 May)
challenging the Tories to come clean on their plans for older people, after
they caused confusion with
their failed attempt to ‘clarify’ their social care policy.

Labour is calling on Theresa May to
guarantee pensioners won’t be hit with further cuts to universal benefits or
further hits to their incomes.

The challenge comes as Labour warns
that, having broken their promise on social care already and announced plans to means test Winter Fuel
Payments, hitting up to ten million pensioners,
the Tories could next come for other benefits,
including free bus passes and TV licences.

Debbie Abrahams, Labour’s Shadow Work
and Pensions Secretary, said:

“The Tories have plunged pensioners
into insecurity. Their manifesto promised to take away winter fuel allowances;
it ditched the security of
the triple lock; and proposed making people pay for essential care with their homes.

“Yesterday, they attempted to back away
from their plans, but only raised more questions about what they were going to
do instead. They could offer no reassurance to worried pensioners.

“Given the gaping hole in the Tory plans, and the dumping of their existing promises,
the risk is now that the Tories could
have other nasty surprises for pensioners up their sleeves. There’s a real possibility that other hard earned
benefits like bus passes and free TV licenses could be next.”

“The promises in the Tory manifesto are
clearly no longer worth
the paper they’re written on. So we are today calling for Theresa May to come
clean, set out what exactly she’s planning and rule out definitively further
attacks on pensioners’ living standards.

“You can’t trust the Tories to protect
pensioners. They offer only insecurity.”

ENDS

Background:

“Nothing has changed” – the Tories
promise insecurity for pensioners

 ·        
We have a crisis in social care under the Tories:

o   The Tories have starved the system of
money, taking £4.6 billion out of social care between 2010 and 2015.

o   The number of people receiving state
funded social care fell by over a quarter under the Tories.

o   This year care
firms have ended contracts with 95 councils, warning they are unable to deliver
services on the amount they are being paid^[i].

o   There are now 1.2 million older people
(1 in 8) with unmet care needs in England.

o   There is a currently a funding gap of
£600 million for 2017/18, which will rise to £2.1bn by 2019/20.^[ii]

·         To help address the Tory social care crisis, Labour has promised to
invest £8bn into social care in the next parliament, including an immediate
£1bn.

“Our first urgent task will be to
address the immediate funding crisis. We will increase the social care budgets
by a further £8 billion over the lifetime of the next Parliament, including an
additional £1 billion for the first year.”

The Labour Party Manifesto 2017

·         The Tories haven not promised to match this funding. Instead they came
forward with a plan which originally said that they would cap care costs and
would help pay for it by means testing Winter Fuel Payments.

“So we will means test Winter Fuel
Payments, focusing assistance on the least well-off pensioners, who are most at
risk of fuel poverty. The money released will be transferred directly to health
and social care, helping to provide dignity and care to the most vulnerable
pensioners and reassurance to their families.”

The Conservative Party Manifesto 2017

“we will introduce a single capital
floor, set at £100,000, more than four times the current means test threshold.
This will ensure that, no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be,
people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets,
including value in the family home.”

The Conservative Party Manifesto 2017

·         They explicitly rejected the policy of having a cap as proposed by
Andrew Dilnot.

Jeremy Hunt:     At the moment if you end up going
into a care home, you could get down to £23,000 and now we’re quadrupling that
amount. And what is the alternative? I think this is the important thing
because I know you had Sir Andrew Dilnot on earlier. If you have that cap that
was his proposal…

Nick Robinson:  Excuse me, it was your proposal in your last
manifesto. You promised to implement it; you passed a law to implement it. You
then said let’s delay it a few years. So let’s not slop it off to Sir Andrew
Dilnot, this was a Tory manifesto promise.

JH:                         
Yes, and we couldn’t be being
clearer.          

NR:                       
You’re dropping it.

JH:                         
Yes, and not only are we dropping it but we are dropping it ahead of a
general election and we’re being completely explicit in our manifesto that
we’re dropping it. We’re dropping it because we’ve looked again at this
proposal and we don’t think it’s fair.

BBC Radio Four: Today, 18 May 2017

·         Despite a chorus of disapproval in response to their plans, Theresa May
herself defended the policy just this weekend.

“You have a situation where two widows
are living side by side in homes of the same value. One of them [has] saved up
all their life and has over £23,000 in savings, now finds that they need care
in a home and has to pay for that because they are above the current threshold.
Then there is [the widow] next door who has perhaps lived the good life and
doesn’t have those savings and gets in for free. And I think we are equalising
home and residential calculations and setting the threshold four times higher
at £100,000.

‘We are being fair to those who have
saved over time.”

Theresa
May, The Times, 20 May 2017

·         Now they’ve changed their minds, but they can’t provide detail about
what their plan will mean. And they have announced no extra money for social
care.

·         This is not just a chaotic change of direction, it’s a repeat of a
broken promise. In their 2015 Manifesto, the Tories promised to introduce a cap
on charges.

“We will cap charges for residential
social care from April 2016 and also allow deferred

payment agreements, so no one has to
sell their home.”

Conservative Party Manifesto 2015, Page
65

·         Only weeks after the 2015 general election, they broke their promise and
announced that the cap on charges for residential social care would be delayed
until 2020.

“we have taken the difficult decision
to delay the introduction of the cap on care costs system until April 2020.”

Written Statement: Care Costs, Lord
Prior of Brampton, 17 July 2015

The Tories have broken their promise
before, how can they be trusted not to do so again?

 

What will the Tories do to fill the
gap?

 

The Tory reversal leaves a substantial black hole in the Tory manifesto.
To date there is no detail on how the cap will operate, at what level it will
be set, who it will apply to and, crucially, how the Tories will deal with the
funding gap in social care which must be filled to give the system the
stability it needs.

 

·         The Tories also have a £2bn black hole in their plans caused by their
reversal on NICs earlier this year.

·         After the U-turn on NICs Hammond said that he would address the £2bn
black hole in the forthcoming Autumn Budget which would be ‘broadly fiscally
neutral’. The £2bn would come from either higher taxes or more cuts elsewhere.

As a result of the decision I have
announced today, the spring Budget is no longer broadly fiscally neutral,
but I am committed to addressing that issue in the
autumn. The intention remains to balance the measures that we are delivering
between spending and taxation.

Philip
Hammond, 15 March 2017

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2017-03-15/debates/8C87BBE6-1F11-44F8-A01E-1D99ECBD0ACA/Class4NationalInsuranceContributions?highlight=broadly%20fiscally%20neutral#contribution-A24CFA97-B0EC-4B6D-8C7F-DC88B51F6250

·         Today’s U-turn, and Hammond’s commitment to a ‘broadly fiscally neutral’
Autumn Budget, means we can expect either post-election tax rises or further
cuts to vital public services under a Tory government.

·         The Tories already pose a threat to pensioners with their plans to cut
Winter Fuel Payments for up to 10 million pensioners.

 

o   Scrap the Triple Lock on state pensions
after 2020.

o   Cut Winter Fuel Payments for up to 10
million pensioners.

o   Raise the State Pension age for up to
34 million workers.

·         That threat could now get even greater, as the Tories may look to
means-test other pensioner benefits such as free bus passes and free TV
licences.

·         The Tory Manifesto‘s wording only commits Theresa May to maintaining the
existence of current benefits throughout the duration of the parliament.

“We will maintain all other pensioner
benefits, including free bus passes, eye tests, prescriptions and TV licences,
for the duration of this parliament.”

Conservative Party Manifesto, 2017

·         This potentially leaves the door open to the introduction of new
means-testing and plans to phase out, reduce, or end benefits after that
parliament.

·         More than 4 million over 75s receive a free TV licences and 9 million
pensioners receive a free bus pass in England alone.

 

·         Theresa May has refused to rule out cutting other universal pensioner
benefits. Just two days before the publication of the Conservative Manifesto,
Theresa May refused to give a straight answer when asked to commit to keeping
free bus passes.

 

Robert Peston:     Thomas is concerned you might
take away bus passes from pensioners and the disabled?

Theresa May:      Well, again, there may be a
number of questions that will come in which are issues that will be addressed
when we publish our manifesto later this week. I’d rather wait until we publish
that package in the manifesto for people to see what we’re going to do.

ITV News Facebook Live, 15 May 2017

 

Other senior Tories have in the past
opposed universal pensioner benefits

 

·         The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Damian Green has described
free bus passes as a “bribe” saying they “take the prize for sheer
all-encompassing pointlessness”.

“Many Chancellors have indulged in
pre-election bribes, some effective, some ineffective and some
straightforwardly cynical, but to offer free off-peak bus passes for pensioners
takes the prize for sheer all-encompassing pointlessness in the large areas of
the country where there will be no one to receive the bribe that the Chancellor
is trying to give them.”

Damian
Green, House of Commons debate, Hansard, 22 March 2005, Column 810

https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/vo050322/debtext/50322-27.htm

·         Senior Ministers Sajid Javid, Matthew Hancock and Liz Truss have
supported the Free Enterprise Group which has previously called for free bus
passes and free TV licences to be means-tested.

“Pensioners with incomes of more than
£50,000 should lose their free TV licences, bus passes and winter fuel
allowances to help cut the deficit, senior Tory MPs have said […] The Free
Enterprise Group numbers 39 Conservative MPs among its supporters, including
the Treasury minister Sajid Javid, the skills minister Matthew Hancock, and the
childcare minister Elizabeth Truss”

Telegraph, 22 November 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9694503/Wealthy-pensioners-should-lose-free-bus-pass-MPs-suggest.html

·         Former Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has previously spoken of the
case for means-testing TV licences.

“I can see a case for means-testing on
the same grounds of why should a rich retired person get a winter fuel payment,
so why should they get a free TV licence? […]“But
these are matters for the BBC to consider. They could get rid of the free TV
licence altogether if they chose to do so but they could not do it until 2020.”

John
Whittingdale, reported in The Times, ‘Free TV licences could be means tested
for over 75s’, 21 May 2017

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/free-tv-licences-could-be-means-tested-for-over-75s-8ktzgbn9t