Temperature tests may be used to determine winter fuel payments
British expat pensioners living abroad in Europe could see the winter fuel payments they receive from the government cut under plans that would mean it is temperature tested.
The fact that expat pensioners can claim the benefit worth up to £300 despite living in warmer places such as the south of France and Spain has long been a source of political debate.
Now the UK’s Work and Pensions Secretary is considering changing the system after an European Union ruling that any British pensioner within the EU could be entitled to the benefit.
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said it is examining the ruling but at present it understands that expat pensioners living in the European Economic Area and Switzerland may be entitled to the payment.
The latest figures available show that in 2010/2011 some 72,840 expats claimed the allowance at a cost of almost £16 million to the UK taxpayer. It is estimated that there are currently 444,000 expat British people in Europe of pensionable age who could take the annual cost to £100 million if they all claimed the allowance.
But many politians in the UK take the view that is should only be for those facing real hardship in terms of heating their homes in the winter.
They believe, for example, that pensioners living in Scotland where it is colder in the winter are entitled to it but those living in the South of Spain should not get it.
Opponents are angry that the EU has made the rules less stringent. Previously, the elderly could only qualify for the winter fuel allowance if they reached 60 before leaving the UK and anyone who left before the payment was introduced in 1998 was also excluded.
But the EU has decided that now claimants only need to ‘have a genuine and sufficient link with the UK’ including having ‘lived or worked in the UK for most of your working life’ to qualify.
It means that anyone born on or before 05 July 1951 can now make a claim for the payment for winter fuel this year. Also any household with a pensioner qualifies for a payment of £200 and those with someone aged over 80 get £300.
Officials are now looking into how a temperature test might work but any change in the criteria would require new legislation and it is not clear if this could be done in time for the 2012 payments.
Critics points out that there are some 60,000 expat pensioners living in France, many of them based in the south where the average temperature in winter can be as high as 13C and in parts of Spain, where there are some 100,000 British pensioners, average temperatures in December and January can reach 17C.
Being from a Chinese origin family who never use soup cubes to make a soup, I'm craving to make stock or broth out of soup bones, be them from beef...
After trawling through some pages on property guru, I've come to the conclusion that either Singaporeans are very uninhibited, or all these places...
I moved from California to Bohol about two years ago. Anybody out there living in Bohol. Thanks
Dennis
Guinsularan, Duero, Bohol
Guys,
can anyone pls check on the mdeiclas link(for whom it is refereed)
I saw problem with application ,all the documents link disappeared......
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The comment that 'the average winter temperature in Spain is 17c' is not so. I have lived just north of Alicante for 26 years and have never experienced this. The temperature and the wind chill factor regularly fall well below zero for prolonged periods. Snow, ice and hailstorms are not uncommon. In addition expatriates become acclimatised to the summer heat and feel the colder winters just as severely as the winter change affects UK residents. It also has the same affect on our fuel bills since the houses are built for the summer heat and and are very susceptable to the winter chill. Most people who write about the 'glorious' winter tempratures in Spain – if they actually experience them! – do so from the comfort of an air-conditioned and centrally heated hotel in the milder tourist spots on the coast.
In August this year when I read in the media about the Stewart case at the European Court of Justice, I immediately rang up the DWP to request the WFA as I emigrated to Spain 2 years short of my 60th birthday and wasn't in receipt of the WFA. After some discussion they told me to download the WFA form and send it in to see if I qualified. I sent that claim form in before the end of August along with a letter asking for WFA back payments and waited and waited and waited.
Several weeks passed and the DWP lacked the courtesy to confirm by email that they had received my claim or letter and I had to phone them to find out what was happening. To cut short a long dragged out stalling action by the DWP plus the receipt of 4 unsolicited claim forms by mail, I'm now at this point with my tortuous battle with the DWP.
They have finally agreed to pay me for the WFA for 2012 going forward but on any back payments they are refusing to budge.
I sought free legal advice for a EU advice centre over the ruling from the ECJ and they confirmed that all judgements from that court are retrospective in nature UNLESS they specifically say otherwise. Needless to say, 3 weeks ago I sent the DWP another letter asking them to justify their stance based on the retrospective nature of the ruling and quoting the legal advice I was given. Fast forward to this week and once more the DWP in their usual discourteous manner refused to answer my letter so I phoned them to demand an answer.
The first DWP personage who was obviously just a lackey and couldn't/wouldn't answer my questions in a satisfactory manner but he arranged for the next level up to phone me back which they did.
To cut to the chase, this is what he said.
The DWP does NOT recognise the retrospective nature of the ECJ ruling and then implied I was quoting from a half baked ex-pat association. Of course, had they had the courtesy to have read my letter they could have seen that advice came from the EU and wasn't made up.
Much heated debate carried on between us until he said he will send my a 'back payment form' for WFA which existed unknown to the general ex-pat community but was another useful stalling move by the DWP. Now comes the interesting part, he said I should fill it in and post it back but it won't make any difference because the DWP is not paying back payments. I then asked him to put that in writing by email, and you guessed it, he refused. I think we can all guess why.
To date, this back payment form does not exist on the DWP website and the DWP has been very silent about it. Just like the WFA payments now available to ex-pats who left the UK prior to 60 years of age, the DWP is going out of its way to hide their liability by not posting anything anywhere on WFA changes and most certainly not on back payments.
My conclusion is that the DWP were trying to avoid paying any more WFA but in this internet age, the cat got out of the bag big time. Similarly they are trying their hardest to avoid paying back payments of WFA even though they know its almost certainly against the ECJ ruling. Their consistent approach has been to obfuscate all direct questions that might nail them clearly in breach of the ruling but deny payment by stubborn cussedness and evasive tactics.
As for my next step, I'm playing their childish games when I receive this newly available back payment claim form and will be filling it in and sending it back. If nothing is forthcoming I'll be contacting the Parliamentary Ombudsman followed by another EU body that deals with 'rogue' governments who won't comply with EU judgements.
I should add that I'm all in favour of scrapping the WFA completely and rolling it into the basic state pension. This is the most practical way as well as cost saving approach to take and it has the advantage that the higher paid pensioners will pay tax on that increase making it means testedt. Sadly despite blogging this approach many times, it appears our Minister in charge of benefits seems incapable of understanding or implementing such a simple approach that will save the country money.
Maybe others who lost out previously should also ask the DWP for WFA back payments as the louder the voice, the more chance they will see sense.