Means-testing winter fuel was obviously correct

I’ve seen a lot of people, lately, making the case that the big problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s government is that its leader doesn’t know what he thinks. The case, essentially, is that he’s in perpetual campaign mode; and that rather than leading (as he’s elected to do) and making the case for the policies he believes are right, he is chasing the ignis fatuus of whatever he imagines to be public opinion. He’s outsourcing policy, runs this line of thinking, to his campaign guru Morgan McSweeney in the hopes of arriving at some formula that will simultaneously appease his backbenchers, lock in the metropolitan progressives, and magically also appeal to socially conservative red-wall types who will otherwise defect to Reform.

This case gets stronger and stronger, I regret to say. Hence, most egregiously, his pirouette on whether women can have dicks. Hence his grandstanding on immigration. Hence his dithering on lifting the two-child limit – it has been calculated as potentially rescuing tens of thousands of children from poverty; but McSweeney apparently frets that it wouldn’t get enough bang – aka ‘electoral capital with voters’ – for the buck. And hence, now, the imminent screeching U-turn on the Winter Fuel Allowance.

It’s reported that Labour, fearing that the decision to means-test this benefit will turn out to be their poll-tax moment, are looking at a range of options to reverse, or partially reverse, the decision. This is, apparently, in response to the local elections wipeout – Labour lost two in three of the seats they were contesting. Stable doors and horses, anyone? A face-saving compromise is being cooked up that would prevent the ultra-rich from getting the winter fuel payment, but in essence, the attempt to means-test it would be abandoned. So Labour will have paid the electoral price for doing the right thing – and now reverse the policy to do the wrong thing after all. A perfect lose-lose.

Because means-testing that allowance was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? If money really is a bit tight, any and all universal benefits – at least where the administrative cost of means-testing won’t actually make them more expensive – need to be knocked on the head. There is no coherent case for doing otherwise. Politicians with an unscrupulous relation to the truth can certainly make rhetorical hay with the image of a dear old grandmother shivering pitiably before her one-bar fire, but that dear old grandmother is not a representative figure, and it’s not the job of government to make policy on the basis of imaginary dear old grandmothers.

It’s the job of government to make policy, rather, on the basis of boring old hard facts, of statistical averages, of means and medians and standard distributions and other of the things that vexed us in GCSE maths. And those figures tell us that on average, pensioners (of whom we have an ever increasing number) are doing rather well. They will tend to be asset-rich (one pensioner in four lives in a millionaire household) and the triple-lock means that pensioner income rises much faster and more reliably than that of the working schmo whose taxes pay for it.

That does not mean that every pensioner is a millionaire, nor (indeed) that every pensioner living in a million-pound house has much in the way of cash floating about. But it’s a compelling case if ever there was one for targeting help to those pensioners who actually need it, rather than showering the entire cohort with taxpayers’ money at an estimated cost of £1.5 billion a year and rising. How might we achieve such a revolutionary thing? Well, means-testing – clue’s in the name – sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?

Yes, there are undoubtedly going to be edge-cases – there will be some pensioners, those right on the edges of the means-testing brackets, who will experience hardship as a result. Any policy broad enough to affect a huge section of the population will, here and there, be crude in its effects. It’ll produce tough luck. But that is a case for means-testing more carefully and precisely, for adjusting to individual circumstances, for showing a human face rather than a bureaucratic monolith. But it is emphatically not a case for abandoning means-testing altogether.

The only real case against means-testing is the one that caused the Tories, when in power, to make so much of the triple-lock, to float the idea of letting the state pay for care-home costs even for those who could amply afford it, and to crusade against inheritance tax: it’s that older people tend to vote, and that they are presumed to tend to vote for any party which offers to line their pockets at the expense of younger, non-voting people.

To point this out is hardly, by the way, a left/right or Labour/Tory position. My former colleague Fraser Nelson – not exactly a Maoist zealot – made exactly this point in The Spectator last year when Rachel Reeves first brought the policy in. As he pointed out, the Winter Fuel Payment was invented by Gordon Brown at a time when the triple-lock didn’t exist, QE hadn’t yet inflated everyone’s asset values, and pensioners could be comfortably assumed to be less well off than their working-age counterparts. But that ain’t the case any more. As he put it: ‘The Tories then turned pensioner support into pensioner bribes.’ Fraser, at the time, not only applauded Reeves’s decision. He warned that she would need to go further if she was to balance the books.

Every penny of the millions of pounds that will go to pensioners who don’t need it as a result of the Winter Fuel reverse ferret is what economists call an opportunity cost: it’s money that could and should be spent elsewhere. Not for electoral advantage, but because it’s the right thing to do.