MPs have voted to remove the winter fuel allowance from all but the poorest pensioners in England and Wales, with a significant number of Labour MPs abstaining.
After a sometimes bad-tempered Commons debate, a Conservative motion to strike down the move was defeated by 348 votes to 228. Just one Labour MP, Jon Trickett, voted for the opposition motion but 52 abstained – at the higher end of predictions.
While it is difficult to know how many of these were active abstainers rather than MPs who had been “paired” with an opposition member for an agreed absence, the high opposition turnout, with just a handful missing from the total 238 active MPs, indicates significant disquiet.
Trickett now risks losing the Labour whip. Also among the rebels were four of the seven Labour MPs who lost the whip for six months after rebelling over the two-child benefit cap in July.
While the active revolt was tiny, such a high number of abstentions will worry Downing Street and Labour whips, with the government trying to use the debate to reiterate its argument that removing winter fuel allowance from all but older people who receive pensioner benefits such as pension credit was a tough but unavoidable choice given their fiscal inheritance.
Castigating what she called the “faux outrage” of Conservative MPs, Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, said increases to the basic state pension under the triple lock system would mean pensioners gaining more than the one-off annual heating allowance, which is £200 or £300 depending on a recipient’s age.
Opening the debate for the Conservatives, who forced a vote on the measure, Mel Stride, the shadow pensions secretary, called on Labour MPs to “look to your conscience” and vote to scrap a plan he said would bring “untold hardship for millions of elderly and vulnerable people”.
Saying that the plan was not in Labour’s manifesto, Stride said: “What happened to integrity? What happened to transparency? It went out of the window.”
Of more note to Labour whips were speeches by some MPs who abstained after roundly criticising the policy.
Rachael Maskell, the MP for York Central, who has been one of the most outspoken Labour critics of the plan, called for it to be delayed and rethought.
Pensioners, she said, “make the hardest budgetary decisions, harder than those of the Treasury, where there are choices. They have no choice. They have to put a roof over the head, they have to pay for their food, and they have to pay for their heating.”
These people, she added, were “telling us they’re frightened because they won’t switch the switch, because they know if they do, they will have bills that they cannot pay”.
Neil Duncan-Jordan, elected in July as the Labour MP for Poole, said the argument that pensioners in need could just apply for pension credit and thus get the payment missed the point of the current universality.
“Means-testing is supposed to target help at those who need it most. But those who need it most, are those who don’t claim it,” he said.
John McDonnell, a former shadow chancellor, who was among the seven MPs to lose the Labour whip in July and who rebelled again on Tuesday, said the move would raise the risk of ill-health or death for vulnerable people and “flies against everything I believe in as a Labour MP”.
He said: “I do regret voting for a motion put forth by these characters [the Conservatives], but I will have to because there’s no other mechanism. And I say to my people back in Hayes: I want to look at them in their face and say, I did the right thing.”