Gregory Stafford

I do not know whether it is incompetence, pig-headedness or callousness, or indeed all of the above, that has led this Labour Government to take the winter fuel payment away from some of the poorest in society. So often today from the Government Benches we have heard about tough choices, but tough choices do not automatically mean the right choice; in fact, in this case it is entirely the wrong choice. I expected to see the panoply of the usual greasers and crawlers from the Labour Benches here today, but they are not here. In fact, as my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson) mentioned, we have seen Labour Members who seem to have donned the hair shirt and decided that this should be their cause célèbre to demonstrate, either to themselves or to their party, that being tough somehow means that they are being a strong Government, which is absolute nonsense. All that the scrapping of the winter fuel payment will lead to is excess deaths. We had warm words from the hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick), but warm words will not heat the pensioners who are freezing in their homes this winter. In my constituency of Farnham and Bordon, more than 18,200 pensioners will have lost the winter fuel payment, and many of them are just above the income threshold for the pension credit benefit. These people are contributing to our society but earning only £13,500 a year. They are not the champagne quaffers that the hon. Member for Makerfield (Josh Simons) talked about; they are the people who fought for and served this country. They have put money into the system and rightly expect a tiny bit back to heat their homes. At a pension credit surgery I held in October, pensioners shared their fears and frustrations. One word kept coming up: betrayal. That is betrayal by this Labour Government of their vote. They are not asking for luxuries or for anything like a handout; all they want is to be able to heat their home in winter. They want to live with dignity, and they want to do so without having to choose whether to heat their home or put food on the table. The idea that this Government would do this without an impact assessment and, subsequently, without doing any monitoring of the impact is shocking. In his winding-up speech, will the Minister commit to doing a full impact assessment to see the rate of NHS admissions and the mortality rates that he talked about, so that we understand whether this policy has killed people? This is not about money; it is about values and decency. Those who built this country should not have to shiver in their homes because of this cruel policy.