Yes, the chancellor’s raid is going to pinch… but it’s time us boomers gave something back

Rachel Reeves has done the right thing by cutting annual winter fuel payments for pensioners like me, says Susan Elkin

Bring them sunshine: ‘I resent strongly the implication that, on account of my age, I’m a leach on society’ (Getty)

I was born in 1947. It used to be called the “bulge” year because there were so many of us baby boomers; conceived at about the same time when our fathers came home from the war and all wanted to start families.

So I’ve grown up with the welfare state, had the advantage of free grammar school and higher education, and have been able to buy my own home. I’ve also worked very hard all my life, and have paid a lot of tax over the years – and even now, in my mid-seventies, I am not retired.

Age, though, entitles me to a modest state pension, alongside my reduced teaching pension and a couple of tiny private ones I had the sense to contribute to when I could. Until now, I also got the winter fuel allowance – but on Monday, it was axed by chancellor Rachel Reeves for 10 million or so pensioners. It will now be means-tested and paid only to older people who are on benefits.

Will I still be able to afford a nightly hot bath and have the radiators on if I feel cold? Yes – although I bridle at Reeves’s tone.

“We will not balance the books on the backs of hardworking people and hardworking taxpayers,” she says, thereby suggesting that pensioners are in some sense inferior and don’t count. I have always been a hardworking taxpayer and still am. I resent strongly the implication that, on account of my age, I’m a leach on society.

Two things occur to me. First, many septuagenarians are far better off than me and have always donated their annual £200 windfall to charity. I have many friends who’ve done this ever since Gordon Brown – a Labour chancellor, please note – introduced the winter fuel allowance in 1997. I hope such folk go on donating it each Christmas, otherwise, some charities will feel the pinch and that will impinge on those in real need.

Second, I worry about the people, and I know a number of those, too, whose income places them just above the benefits threshold. Every penny counts, and they really did rely on that £200 each winter. I hope Reeves is aware that some of these unfortunates will stay in bed to keep warm if there’s a cold snap.

Is that what the welfare state has come to? Just imagine how she and her party would have protested if the Conservatives had scrapped the allowance last year. If these are your parents or grandparents, you should be worrying, too.

Of course, it’s true that my generation has been fortunate and I’m grateful but, equally, we were relatively undemanding and many of us were thrifty – the latter being a concept which seems largely to have disappeared. I started married life in 1969 with a second-hand fridge and an elderly sofa whose arm fell off if you leaned on it. I had no fitted kitchen, washing machine or food mixer. But we were content to build from there, towards a better future, and that meant living frugally and saving. Younger generations have glitzier expectations – the fulfilment of which is expensive.

On balance, I think Reeves has probably done the right thing – because I want to see younger people supported to achieve the security that I now have. If reducing my income by £200 a year can help to do that, then so be it.

But please don’t let’s have further incursion into my income in the autumn Budget. People like me, lifelong industrious taxpayers, should not be picked on as cash cows to shore up a £22bn black hole.