StayWarm Special Briefing 2006/7 Discussion Area

Cardew

BernardM wrote: »

I have found this study Cardew, how exaggerated and inaccurate will you find this study I dont know.
http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/housing/n11.asp

Why would you object to seeing pensioners being given much more income and benefits. We just dont look after pensioners like our European neighbours do.

I really wonder if you bother reading anything at all.

How on earth do you deduce that I have any objection to pensioners being given more income and benefits?

Also there is nothing wrong with that Rowntree Foundation report as far as I am aware; have you read it?

Firstly I corrected your comment that there hasn't been an increase in Winter Fuel Allowance - and you haven't seen fit to acknowledge you were wrong.

Then you pluck a figure out of the air of half a million old people dying from winter related deaths.

Then unbelievably you attribute those deaths to pensioners unable to afford heating.

The report you link to quite correctly states that there is some evidence that some of those deaths are attributable to houses not being well heated - which nobody has disputed.

However the quote below indicates that the 'poor' are no more at risk than the 'well off'

The one finding that appears counter-intuitive is the absence of a clear socio-economic gradient in risk of excess winter death. Cardio-vascular and all-cause mortality are known to have a strong association with poverty, but this appears not to be shown by excess winter death.

The excellent and respected Rowntree Foundation has produced many reports on this subject over the years and indeed the report you link to is 7 years old.

It is a wildly held view that as a result of these reports(among others) were instrumental in persuading the Government to introduce Winter fuel allowance and provide subsidised insulation, and indeed free insulation for some pensioners.

To ease administrative costs the allowance(now £250/£400) is paid cash(cheques/bank) to all households with an occupant over 60/80 regardless of income. It would have been far more effective if it could have reduced heating bills.

It is also an undeniable fact that many pensioners treat the £250 as a bonus income and do not use it to provide extra heat.

As I said earlier by all means campaign for a better deal for pensioners, but posting some of the emotive nonsense you have put in this thread implying all those xxthousand pensioners are dying every year because they cannot afford to heat their houses is absurd!

BernardM

You originally asked "Where on Earth did I get those figures from" . The UK media and also an article from Age Concerns website.
Is that not correct?.

I reposted links or the whole of an article for you of where these figures came from.
Is that not correct.?

They all clearly state that they died from the cold or related illnesses.
Is that not correct?.

Where exactly have I personally stated every single one died of not having enough money to heat their homes. Only you stated this absurd fact.
What I have stated and all these articles point out is that the cold has contributed to every single death.http://www.britishgassafety.co.uk/News.aspx?cid=133

You are really accusing the UK media and those charities who wrote those articles of emotive nonsense as they state all these facts every year, not me.


Telling me I may not have appreciated that there are now winter fuel payments for over 60s and has gone up £50 . I assumed from that you think I am ungrateful and should not expect to receive any more so soon.

So do you think enough is being done then. Anyone looking at that graph can only come to one conclusion. No

BernardM

The other quote about the increase was slightly outdated about the increase.

Technically we haven't received it yet it wouldn't surprise me if Darling doesn't take it back as he wants just working class people to tighten belts.

It was the 5 year freeze that I wanted to point out from their website. I should have edited that sentence before posting. I dragged and dropped.

You say nothing about this 5 year freeze on the payment

Wrong! Thats not how you spell exaggerated Cardew.
Go correct.

Cardew

BernardM wrote: »

You originally asked "Where on Earth did I get those figures from" . The UK media and also an article from Age Concerns website.
Is that not correct?.

I reposted links or the whole of an article for you of where these figures came from.
Is that not correct.?

They all clearly state that they died from the cold or related illnesses.
Is that not correct?.

Where exactly have I personally stated every single one died of not having enough money to heat their homes. Only you stated this absurd fact.
What I have stated and all these articles point out is that the cold has contributed to every single death.http://www.britishgassafety.co.uk/News.aspx?cid=133

You are really accusing the UK media and those charities who wrote those articles of emotive nonsense as they state all these facts every year, not me.


Telling me I may not have appreciated that there are now winter fuel payments for over 60s and has gone up £50 . I assumed from that you think I am ungrateful and should not expect to receive any more so soon.

So do you think enough is being done then. Anyone looking at that graph can only come to one conclusion. No

This is what you wrote:

No one is saving since privatisation. I think Martin should get political now and start shouting louder for the pensioners. He made a brilliant point on a BBC interview even though that appearance was strangely highlighted on here for a him accidently giving the finger to us. I still can't believe we are not marching the streets over the number of deaths of pensioners from the cold over the 10 years New Labour have been in. It must be close to half a million, yet a temperate climate. Its supposed to be a scandal but every year the figures come out telling us another 30000 dead. Surely Martin could say something big on this and shame Brown publically who refuses to to nothing for us today. This has to be more important than Carol Vorderman adverts.

1.Close to half a million pensioners dead in the 10 years New labour has been in???

2. In a thread about Gas and Electricity, those pensioners dying from the cold????

3. It seems to you that winter related deaths are caused by being unable to afford heat houses. All? Some? How many?

4. No rise in Winter fuel allowance?? - going from £100 to £200 to £250(£400 for over 80s) is not a rise?

To assume that someone stating that your posts are rubbish, means that they are not sympathetic to pensioners is in line with the rest of your posts.

BernardM

1.Close to half a million pensioners dead in the 10 years New labour has been in???
Is that not accurate.

3. It seems to you that winter related deaths are caused by being unable to afford heat houses. All? Some? How many?

JRF study Conclusion 
Taken as a whole, the results suggest a credible chain of causation which links poor housing and poverty to low indoor temperatures to cold-related deaths. The three parts of the analysis appear to provide a consistent picture: the seasonal excess of mortality is greatest in dwellings whose characteristics are likely to be associated with poor space heating; temperature measurements confirm that these same dwelling characteristics are indeed associated with low internal temperatures; and there is evidence that specifically cold-related mortality is greatest in the coldest homes.

4. No rise in Winter fuel allowance?? - going from £100 to £200 to £250(£400 for over 80s) is not a rise?

It was frozen since 2003. That was my point .

BernardM

Cardew wrote: »

Where on earth do you get those figures from?

Have you not appreciated that all households with an over 60 year old get a Winter fuel Payment - was £200, now £250.

Have you not appreciated that this government are guilty of theft. If we lived in a proper civilized society they would all be in jail.
They have effectively stolen the pensions of all our pensioners since 1997.
An agreement in the seventies that pension increases would be linked to the increase in salaries and wages or to the Retail Price Index, whichever was the higher. Today, having had it taken away, it means that every pensioner in Britain is 40% worse off than they would have been had the link been maintained.
This Fuel payment is not enough, I see you still totally ignore my point that it was not increased for 5 years.

paigntondi

BernardM, I rather believe that the link between increases in wages/retail prices was broken by the Conservative government led by Mrs Thatcher. Of course, before Labour came to power, there was no such thing as the Winter Fuel Allowance. Incidentally, I live in a detached 2bed. bungalow in Devon and pay £77.00 a month to Staywarm. A friend and his wife who are both in their 50's and live in a smaller bungalow than me are paying over £90 per month on 'normal' tariffs.

BernardM

Thats right paigntondi, but New Labour which came into office 1997 has compounded this betrayal by also refusing to restore the link, despite promising to do so prior to the election in 1997.

BernardM

Don't make them beg
(Wednesday 22 October 2008)
HOW any Labour MP can remain indifferent to the call for pensions justice when Parliament has stitched up the best pensions deal in the country for its inmates defies belief.

But, while there has always been an honourable minority of Labour backbenchers who have stood up for state pensioners, the vast majority have treated them, as one campaigner said, "like Oliver Twist coming with a begging bowl."

People who have worked all their lives should not be reduced in retirement to petitioning the government for a little more.

The labour movement set itself the target over a quarter of a century ago of restoring the link between the state pension and average earnings.

The Labour Party supported this campaign until it got close to Downing Street and, since then, it has opted for the same approach as the Tories.

That approach is based on minimal rises to the basic state pension, which has meant an erosion of its value, forcing pensioners to submit to means-tested benefits.

At one time, Labour MPs would have understood that this would lead to billions of pounds going unclaimed by people who need the benefits but are not prepared to bear the embarrassment of having all of their personal finances being trawled through.

These days, the same people who prepare generously for their own retirement and who, until very recently, were prepared to accept fellow MPs' word for large sums of unauthenticated expenses feel the need to put elderly people through this trauma.

As chancellor, Gordon Brown cried crocodile tears for pensioners, insisting that he was concentrating extra payments on the poorest because the country couldn't afford real pensions justice.

Pensioners and campaigners on their behalf used to cite the billions wasted on Trident nuclear-armed submarines and the cost of criminal overseas wars.

Government apologists also referred to a demographic time bomb, which was supposed to lie just around the corner when there would be too few people working to pay for this life of luxury for pensioners.

This argument was rubbish then and it's rubbish now.

The government's National Insurance Fund already has a surplus of £50 billion, contributed to, in part, by today's pensioners when they were working.

Raising the value of the state pension to the level that it would have been if Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hadn't broken the link would cost only £11 billion a year.

The pensioners' case relies not only the issue of justice but also the realisation that most pensioners will spend the extra pension that they receive, driving up consumer demand at a time of looming recession.

The Exchequer will benefit from indirect taxation by means of VAT on sales and also direct taxation from pensioners who already have occupational pensions.

If means-testing was the best way of ensuring a decent life for all pensioners, then it would be equally applicable to MPs and bankers.

But, of course, MPs insist upon a comprehensive approach for themselves, because it is just and also more efficient than means-testing.

All that pensioners want is a measure of that same justice for themselves and for future generations.

BernardM

Not enough to feel pain
(Thursday 02 October 2008)
GOVERNMENT ministers acknowledge that fuel poverty is a problem and insist that they feel the pain of those at the sharp end.

That may not be too bad for a start, but, if it's the full extent of government involvement, then those poor families and state pensioners who will face the real dilemma this winter of deciding whether to feed themselves or turn on the heating are entitled to feel let down.

There is no point in saying: "This is a really big problem, but what can we do? We're only the government."

Soft words and sympathetic smiles butter no parsnips. The government has the power to take action and failure to do so will translate as complicity in this latest crime against working people and the poor.

Apologists for privatisation, market forces and profit maximisation, such as all three of the major parties in Parliament, act as though the constantly escalating fuel prices are an act of God.

They are not. They are the direct result of government policies over the past three decades when North Sea oil and gas were squandered, being used to undermine and then close down Britain's deep-mined coal industry.

Setting up gas-fired power stations to produce electricity was wasteful but very profitable for the energy transnationals to which government handed over our North Sea reserves.

And the subsequent transfer, at knockdown prices, of our publicly owned gas and electricity industries was another bonanza for the City parasites who plundered this collective wealth.

All of these industries were built up by collective effort and government investment. Working people ought to be reaping the benefits rather than being faced by mounting bills that are increasingly difficult to pay.

Ministers insist that nothing can be done to infringe the free operation of market forces in these sectors, even though anyone can see that what is taking place is a scandal.

It is not a free market. The wholesale energy providers have retail subsidiaries and they gouge out profits at every area of their operations.

They tag their gas prices to those of oil for no other reason than that it is profitable to do so and then wash their hands of the consequences.

The issue should be taken out of their hands by the government in the interests of working people and the poor.

If Gordon Brown feels compelled to throw tens of billions of pounds at the banking industry to cure its self-inflicted wounds, he can take action to help those who suffer from problems not of their own making.

The Prime Minister should order an immediate and punitive windfall tax on energy profits, a cap on prices and a moratorium on disconnections.

The windfall tax must be used, in part, to help those who can't afford to pay their bills to do.

But he should go further and recognise that past decisions to turn natural monopolies into profiteering oligopolies were wrong and must now be reversed.

The current chaos in the banking sector proves that the profit motive is not the best basis on which to organise society. All energy companies, including coal, should be taken back into public ownership without delay.