The former Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle has said he believes there should be a vote on cutting the winter fuel payment.
Speaking on GB News, Lloyd Russell-Moyle said: “I would have preferred them to have done it in a slightly different way. I think you could have taxed in a different way to include the winter fuel payments in tax payments.
“They haven’t. And so I think that therefore you are lumbered with it.
“Now, whether it’s a positive or a negative statutory instrument is laid out in the initial legislation. So it’s not the government just choosing, what should we try and get away with today?
“It will say if you want to modify winter fuel payments, brought in by Gordon Brown, of course, you have to do it via either the positive or the negative.
“It will have said in the law, it can be changed with the negative.
“That just means the Leader of the Opposition,Rishi or whoever it will be, needs to lay down that note complaining about it, and get most of their backbenchers and most of their front benchers to sign, and then there will be a vote. That’s how these things work.
“So I am confident there will be a vote and there should be a vote. It wasn’t the government’s choosing to not have the vote in that way.
“I think it is the right policy that we start to relook at how those winter fuel payments and the pension are made.
“To some extent, we should just be upping the pension so that people don’t need winter fuel payments.
“The idea that pensioners are in so much poverty that they can’t afford fuel payments, that we have to give them a special handout every winter is wrong. We should change the way our pension works.
“[Linking it to the tax threshold] would have been my preference. But I think that the feeling was that the accounts needed to be presented in such an atrocious way that they had to do something that was very dramatic.”
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