Winter Fuel Payment Increase?

Ganga

Does anyone know if the winter fuel payment has gone up? my wife has just received her notification that hers is about to be paid and it is £200!
I retired a few years ago and have been recieving the payment for a few years but have heard nothing yet this year.

greenglide

If your wife got £200 then it looks as if you will get nothing.


Are you both currently in receipt for state pension? Is either or both in receipt of pension credit?


It sounds as if one of you has got lost in the huge data matching excercise that has to be undertaken each year to identify who is entitled to what.


One of you hasn't moved house (real or imagined) have you?

Ganga

greenglide wrote: »

If your wife got £200 then it looks as if you will get nothing.

That will be right,should i ask her for my half:eek:

Are you both currently in receipt for state pension? Is either or both in receipt of pension credit?

She draws her state pension,mine is defered

It sounds as if one of you has got lost in the huge data matching excercise that has to be undertaken each year to identify who is entitled to what.


One of you hasn't moved house (real or imagined) have you?

No still living in same house.
I used to get the full amount of £200 till my wife retired then we got £100 each:rotfl:

p00hsticks

I've seen a few posts around this year of halves of couples mistakenly being given £200 rather than £100.


e,g
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5930258&highlight=winter+fuel+allowance

greenglide

So the matching between the pension system and the winter fuel payment system (which should pay people who are not currently in receipt of state pension) hasnt worked.


Possible that your claim on the winter fuel payment system that you seem to have made some years ago has ended / been lost! You haven't had any letters from them?

p00hsticks

greenglide wrote: »

So the matching between the pension system and the winter fuel payment system (which should pay people who are not currently in receipt of state pension) hasnt worked.
?

Not necessarily - WFA's are processed until 14th January, so there's plenty of time for the OP to receive something. What there appears to be a problem with once eligible recipients have been identified is the additional step of working out if there is more than one recipient on a household and so the payment should be split (as the WFA is per household, not individual).

greenglide

The match between different benefits is run first - it has to be before the payments have been made.



The OPs wife has already been paid the full rate so a further payment to the OP would not fix things!

p00hsticks

greenglide wrote: »

The match between different benefits is run first - it has to be before the payments have been made.

Yes, but having identified all eligible recipients across all benefits at the start of winter, the actual payment runs are spread out across a couple of months - so just because the OP hasn't recieved anything yet doesn;t necessarily mean they were excluded. It may be that they failed to identify that him and his wife were in the same household.

greenglide wrote: »

The OPs wife has already been paid the full rate so a further payment to the OP would not fix things!

Agreed - but as the link in my previous post demonstrated, there has been at least one case so far this year of both members of a household erroneously getting the full amount.

Ganga

Thanks for taking the time to read and reply,i presume that they will-

a) write and tell me that my half has been paid to my wife

b)pay me £100 then write later and ask for £100 back from my wife

c)hopefully not pay me £200 and then ask for £100 back off each of us

brewerdave

The first time that my wife claimed WFA, my payment still came in at £200 in November, whilst she got £100 just before Xmas.
I phoned up in the New Year following to ask about repaying the excess amount - the person I talked to, assured me that it would be picked up "in due course" - 2 years later ,still hasn't happened!!


EDIT -Looking back WFA has actually decreased - first year I qualified,I got £250

anmarj

It has never increased or decreased in years, in some years extra payments were made which have never been repeated since. :-)