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Winter Fuel Payment - I'll be 63 when I get it
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MoneySavingExpert
Chair, Martin Lewis · Editor, Marcus Herbert
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The pension age changes throughout the year -
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181343/spa-timetable.pdf
But will this change this afternoon I wonder
Where finances are treated as one unit what is the point of both partners claiming £100 each when one could receive £200?
Maybe because not everyone treats finances as one unit. Each individual draws their own pension entitlement, not as one unit.
Before I found wisdom, I became old.
Not quite - they're the dates of birth of the youngest females who would qualify for state pension on the qualifying date for the Winter fuel Payment (which is not 5th April). I'm not sure exactly how this qualifying date is determined but it's towards the end of September (as you can see from the dates quoted for 2021-22 onwards, when the gradual extension of pension age to 66 has finished).
But that's just being argumentative for the sake of it.
Where finances are treated as one unit what is the point of both partners claiming £100 each when one could receive £200?
So if the younger partner doesn't claim will the elder partner's £200 be reduced to £100 pending a claim by the younger partner or will the powers that be allow the status quo to prevail.?
This is a question, can you answer without diverging please.
Consistency is too much to ask for from our civil servants but then having loads of diferent qualifying dates keeps so many of them in a job.
I think it's quite sensible to have the qualifying date for a Winter fuel Payment to be at the start of winter.
To be crude, anyone who reaches the qualifying date for the payment is entitled to the whole payment even if they drop dead a day later, so from a treasury point of view it doesn't make sense to have the qualifying date any earlier than necessary.
If you are looking for simplicity I suggest it would be best to scrap the payment altogether and add £1-£2 to the weekly pension but I suspect people would complain if that happened.
I wouldn't call 5 July the start of winter.
I was looking to cut the number of civil servants and their unaffordable salaries by getting rid of the number of jobs they duplicate just for a halfpenny's worth of difference.
Don't forget that this money isn't entirely for winter fuel although that is the name it goes by.
So you don't know the answer to the question then
Nor would I - and I didn't. The 'qualifying' date and the corresponding date of birth currently don't match up because the women's state pension age is gradually being brought line with mens.
A woman born on 5th July 1951 reached state pension age on 6th September 2012 - i.e. just before the qualifying date for the Winter Fuel Payment, which as I stated in my previous post is towards the end of the end of September. (A women born a day later didn't reach Pension age until 6th November 2012 so missed out on the payment last year).
If you look at the government website, the qualifying dates mentioned this year at which you needed to be resident in the UK were 16th-22nd September. https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment/eligibility
Once men's and women's pension ages have reached the same in 2020, you can see that the required birth date once matches the qualifying date in September, as the State Pension age is then an exact number of years.