Article extracting the from the DWP

Cantilip

You might have read pensioners deprived of the fuel allowance are being 'encouraged' to apply for pension credit. You might also have read this requires answering 243 questions.

Not that it's really funny. Off the top of my head I can think of four elderly ladies who'd be absolutely unable to do this.

I tried answering all 243 questions to keep my winter fuel payment

The government is encouraging pensioners to find out if they have eligibility for financial assistance. There’s just one small task to complete

Saturday August 31 2024, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

ILLUSTRATION BY RUSSEL HERNEMAN

My name is Paul and I’m a pensioner.

If that sounds like someone introducing themselves to a 12-step recovery meeting, you’re only a couple of hundred steps off. In fact, there are 243 questions in the new application form for pension credit, without which you’ll be ineligible for a winter fuel allowance under the Labour government’s new rules.

The only people eligible to keep their allowance will be those who have pension credit, which is extra money for low-income pensioners to help with living costs. After a long career as a writer, I’m a pauper at 72. However, having done the sums, it’s not clear to me whether I will be eligible for the allowance, which is available for couples on an income of less than £332.95 a week.

But just as I’m resigning myself to the loss, I see news of a government campaign encouraging me to double-check whether I might be eligible for pension credit — if I can navigate the test.

Even better, the Department for Work and Pensions tells me it has prepared for the extra workload by torturing a verb, having “surged additional staff” to deal with potential problems.

Up to 880,000 households are thought to be eligible for pension credit, so if they all navigate the form successfully the Treasury will have a bill of £3.8 billion.

This seems unlikely, however. It takes me about an hour to find the application form online. When I find it, the first thing I see, in bold type at the top, is a warning:

We have many ways we can communicate with you.

Oh, come on. Why not just say, “We have ways of making you talk?” They’re having a laugh. Never mind, let’s start answering the questions.

I’m still on the first page when I learn I shouldn’t really be here at all. “The quickest way to apply for pension credit is by phone,” it says. This is encouraging advice, unless you’re someone who has tried to contact any organisation by phone at any time within the past 20 years. No, thanks. I’ve already listened to quite enough Vivaldi while being assured repeatedly that my call is important.

The number of questions about a partner’s financial affairs are “surely yet another reliable recipe for strife”

The first few questions are standard stuff about your name and address, but then question 12 asks, out of the blue, “Do you want to speak to us in Welsh?” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but the suggestion seems to hint at something clandestine, delivered with a wink and a tap of the nose. Or maybe that’s just me.

It’s on the next page that you begin to get the feeling you’re wading through treacle in a dream. It all starts with the tricky subject of your partner. After struggling to define the term, the form asks increasingly imponderable questions, including number 18: “Does your partner agree to you making this application?”

A huge can of worms opens at your feet, inviting you to fall in. What if your partner agrees but changes their mind? What if they’re lying? What if you’re lying and they find out? Don’t even go there. But the questions continue to go there, and go further, dragging your children into an already volatile domestic tinderbox. Who are they (27-31)? What date did you become responsible for the child (33)? How often do they live with you (35)? Where else do they live (36)?

Hey, ask them, not me. And please tell them to phone me.

After question 58 (What rate of personal independence payment is the child entitled to?) I begin to notice increasingly tantalising shortcuts that enable you to skip ahead if you answer yes (or in some cases, no) to a particular question.

This cruel ploy is an open inducement to cheat, like an employee of Ikea surreptitiously opening a door in the bathroom department and beckoning you into the secret route back to the checkout, in defiance of the arrows on the floor.

No good will come of it, and I reach question 155 (Has your partner claimed any benefits that you are waiting to hear about?) with my integrity intact, although asking me about what my partner may or may not be revealing about their finances is surely yet another reliable recipe for strife.

Later, in an idle moment, I find myself thinking that had the obsessive degree of rigour that overburdens this process been deployed in, say, the matter of awarding dodgy PPE contracts, there might now be enough money around to spare pensioners this insanely prolonged interrogation.

An absurd idea, of course, and doubtless the fanciful product of an addled geriatric imagination.

To be fair to our bureaucratic paymasters, some thought and care has clearly gone into making the questions in the application form as simple and clear as possible. However, no thought at all has been devoted to the possibility that their sheer profusion and range is overwhelming.

For those who don’t make the cut, I would recommend just printing out the form and burning it to stay warm this winter.

I finally reach question 211 (At any time has your partner come to live or returned to live in the UK from abroad?) and give up. Life is too short.

It certainly could be for a lot of pensioners this winter, at any rate.

I tried answering all 243 questions to keep my winter fuel payment (thetimes.com)

michael57

i am looking to swop my dawnie as at 61 she is to young for us to get it bless her