The Scottish government has today confirmed that it will follow Westminster’s decision to end the universal payment of winter fuel payments to pensioners. Instead, a Holyrood-run alternative will ensure that those elderly Scots most in need are still supported through means-testing. Social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville insists she is unhappy about the decision, stating today that she had ‘no alternative but to replicate the decision’ after Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced cuts in England.
Somerville claims that the Chancellor’s decision to end universal entitlement for winter fuel payments means a cut of almost 90 per cent of the funding for the Scottish benefit. This sounds bleak, doesn’t it? But the social justice secretary has inadvertently drawn attention to the benefit Scotland gains from membership of the Union. Without the Barnett formula, SNP ministers would be redesigning this benefit without any money at all to fund it. As it is, the new means-tested benefit will be underpinned by ‘Westminster’ money – and if the Nats wanted to retain the payment as it once was, they do have the option of redirecting funding from elsewhere. However I’m not entirely sure many Scots will be especially distressed by the reconfiguration of the winter fuel payment. Its universal nature meant it was given to the wealthiest pensioners – but the SNP doesn’t seem to have much in its arsenal these days beyond confected grievance.
The SNP doesn’t seem to have much in its arsenal these days beyond confected grievance.
Often what senior nationalist figures believe to be arguments for independence are signs that Scottish devolution is working. SNP politicians generally characterise their decisions as acts of defence against the brutality of Westminster. ‘We’re doing all we can to save you,’ goes the story. ‘Just imagine how much more we could achieve if we were free.’ This is all claptrap, of course. The fundamental purpose of devolution was to allow legislators in the UK’s devolved nations – thought to best understand the needs of their communities – to make the decisions that suited them most. When a Nat declares that their party has ‘mitigated’ the worst the UK government is dealing out, what they mean is that ministers in Edinburgh have exercised their right to take a different decision on a particular issue to the one taken in London.
This power to do things differently was perhaps most significantly exercised when the SNP introduced the Scottish Child Payment. This has now been lifted to a payment of £26.70-per-child in families whose financial circumstances qualify them for additional support. It’s clearly a significant and positive intervention – and one that is means-tested. I’m not sure any government would (or could) authorise benefit payments of a hundred quid-plus each month for every kid in the country. And this is where the SNP government’s argument falls flat. Why means-testing in the case of a child benefit is appropriate but not when it comes to the elderly remains a mystery, possibly explained somewhere in the SNP’s impenetrable and changeable moral code.
The Scottish government’s attacks on Rachel Reeves’s decision are exhausting and irrelevant. Ministers at Holyrood can and will do something different. Despite the nationalists’ cries to the contrary, divergence often means devolution is working how it was intended to. Whether the SNP government is functioning as well as it hoped it might is another matter.
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