From May, pensioners will have to claim Universal Credit if they have a partner below pension age

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Paul Treloar circulated this on twitter today:

Government announce that old-age pensioners will now have to claim Universal Credit from 15 May if they have a partner below pension age. Absolute cowards sneaking this announcement out today, to be drowned out in Brexit debate tomorrow

from 15th May 2019 https://t.co/QY39DLHnY6— Paul Treloar (@PaulieTandoori) January 14, 2019

For god’s sake. Who else can they target?

It’s bad enough watching government throw sick and disabled people off employment and support allowance and leaving them with nothing while they try to apply for Universal Credit. God knows I’m seeing that again and again.

Now they’re going for pensioners.

The full statement on the start of this change is here:

Made by: Guy Opperman (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Pensions & Financial Inclusion) HCWS1249

…”In 2012, Parliament voted to modernise the welfare system to ensure that couples, where one person is of working age and the other person is over state pension age, access support, where it is needed, through the working age benefit regime. This replaces the previous system whereby the household could access either Pension Credit and pension age Housing Benefit, or working-age benefits.

Pension Credit is designed to provide long-term support for pensioner households who are no longer economically active. It is not designed to support working age claimants. This change will ensure that the same work incentives apply to the younger partner as apply to other people of the same age, and taxpayer support is directed where it is needed most.

I set out to Parliament last year that this change would be implemented once Universal Credit was available nationally for new claims. Today I can confirm that this change will be introduced from 15th May 2019. “

So much for Amber Rudd’s compassionate Universal Credit. If you buy into that woman’s bleeding heart routine, you’ll buy into anything.

Every member of this government is a sociopath.

Read the rest here. Thanks to Paul Treloar for the tweet and links.

36 thoughts on “From May, pensioners will have to claim Universal Credit if they have a partner below pension age”

  1. They’ll be out at the next election for sure, but not before they’ve killed off as many poor people as possible. Utter bastards.

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      • Looks like the foodbanks are here to stay, and will be for some time to come. Thousands of OAPs struggling to carry food parcels home…it’s about population reduction, a mass cull of the poor and anyone economically inactive /surplus to requirements.

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      • I was sorting through my bookshelves the other day when I came across a copy of ‘The work you want, the help you need’ a DWP publication given to claimants in the bad old days of New Labour, published in 2004. On page 62 of that book there is a statement that says that Pension Credit was everyone over the age of 60 with a weekly income of less than £105.45. This, as much as anything should show how much things have changed.

        New Labour, in many ways, shit, but at the very least they didn’t forget their humanity. It’s now obvious that the Tories have absolutely no humanity whatsover, but of course, they’ll again be allowed to get away with this latest obscenity by a complacent, and indeed, complicit Labour Party. Sure, we might get some faux outrage from some of them, but nothing will be done in any in any concrete sense.

        However, this move is quite possibly the dumbest one yet , that the Tories have made. Having a go at the partners of pensioners who are under pensionable age should no indicate where exactly the Tory scum have their sights set; pensioners themselves. It was only a matter of time really.

        The one thing that pensioners do to a far greater extent that most other age groups is go out and vote. The Tories can upset most groups pretty much with impunity, but not the pensioners, who are pretty organised, and will not like this latest development one little bit, as it shows that, at long last, the Tories are gunning for them too. I feel for those of them who are still living under the delusion that their pension is a right, and not a benefit, but this might be the wake-up call that many of them need.

        I cannot now think of the Tories without immediately thinking of Aneurin Bevan’s words where he describes the Tories are ‘lower than vermin’.

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  2. Eventually there won’t be a State Pension, they are shifting the goal posts, making it more unobtainable, and will phase it out by stealth.

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    • Very true Trev. There are many on the right-wing who think that people should make their own private pension arrangements. Just as they dislike the free NHS, and would prefer a paid healthcare system.

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      • There are some who think that, but most of them probably don’t have the first clue how expensive the insurance for private healthcare would cost them. By comparison, the NHS is excellent value for money, in terms of what it costs us in taxes.

        It always seems a little strange to me that those who go on the most about scroungers and the notion that the country can’t afford the costs of the unemployed are often the very same people who assert that the state pension and the NHS aren’t part of the Welfare State, i.e. ‘benefits’, as in being the benefit of living in a civilised, caring country, even though Brexit seems to have tarnished that somewhat recently.

        The Tories get away with all this crap basically because they are allowed to by the totally useless Labour Party who seem convinced there is nothing they can do whilst they are out of power, ( I won’t use the word ‘opposition’ as that would be far too strong a word for what they do) and even go so far as to fundamentally support the government by abstaining in a crucial vote that could have made the implementation of Universal Credit nigh on impossible.

        I think you’re right Trev, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that Corbyn will be in No 10 after the next General Election, he’s been too arrogant by far, and had alienated far too many of the young people, (and the not so young too) who would support him 100% if he came out against Brexit and promised the big changes we need should be be elected.

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      • I keep saying that every time an election comes up. But still there are some people who vote Tory who shouldn’t. Aneurin Bevan’s quip that successful Toryism and an intelligent electorate were a contradiction in terms is right on the money!

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  5. This change to the pension rules, making mixed age couples claim Universal Credit if one of them is below pension age, is nothing more than a thinly disguised attack on the State Pension itself. There are those on the more extreme end of the Universal Credit project who would be delighted to see pensions as we know them disappear, and be incorporated into Universal Credit. Then you really would have ‘one benefit to rule them all ‘.

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  6. Come back Tony and lead us !
    The election’s in ‘22
    Things have gone to Hell in your absence
    And the Labour Party needs you

    Don’t be put off by Momentum
    Or those who shout ‘ Iraq ’
    For taking it all together
    We truly wish you were back

    A white-haired Guru leads us
    He doesn’t really know where
    And half his own MP’s
    And most of the public don’t care

    The party is in the doldrums
    Defeat looks certain now
    If only you’d use your magic
    We could still win….somehow

    #Progress

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    • However, this totally ignores the fact that Blair was nothing more than a Tory “Thatcher in trousers” as dubbed by the famous historian Eric Hobsbawm. New Labour had 13 years in which to reverse the injustices imposed by Thatcher and her crew, but chose to do nothing, and indeed commenced the policies that the current crop of Tory vermin merely intensified.

      Had Blair reversed the Thatcher polices and installed policies more fitting of democratic socialism it would probably have made what the current government are doing nigh on impossible. Imagine that, a UK without Universal Credit.

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  7. Something very strange is going on, whereby for some time now brown envelopes from the dwp have been delivered to my address but are addressed to people I’ve never heard of who don’t live here. I usually just write on the envelope “not known at this address” and post them back in the post box, but out of curiosity I opened the most recent one and it was a Universal Credit letter telling some guy that £350 has been paid into his account. Now, it’s not unusual to continue receiving the odd letter addressed to previous tenants when you live in rented flats but I’ve been here for 4 years and have never heard of any of these people, and I know the name of at least two former occupants before me and it’s not them either. So how can dwp letters be coming when the person ‘s claim would obviously be in their current address, for one thing, and it appears these people have never even lived here. I wonder if there is some weird glitch in the dwp system that is sending other peoples letters to my address? Just shows what a mess it’s all in. I think in future I’m going to save any such letters and hand them in to the jobcentre, let them deal with it.

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    • It’s just dawned on me what might be happening. My landlord is a private property company that owns several other houses/flats, and they use the house where I live as a mailing address, so we get lots of letters for them, which we put to one side in a little pile on a small table in the hallway /entrance & the landlady calls round once a week and picks up her mail. I bet what’s happening is that some of her other tenants are claiming Benefits and the dwp are sending their letters to the landlord’s address by mistake. Sometimes though I have left such letters amongst the pile of letters for the housing company but the landlady hasn’t taken them. That must be what’s happening. So various people are not receiving the dwp letters that they may be expecting or waiting for, and the dwp will undoubtedly swear blind that they have been sent, which they have BUT to the wrong address! Presumably they are the “one or two people” Rudd referred to, who’d have thought?

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  11. hi makes me feel ill that our people haven’t got a leader to handle these upperclass schoolboys I can think of at least 10 good people to fill those front benches we posess brilyant statespeople in our ranks?yet all they seem to be able to come up is more of the same idelisttic crap plenty of pipe dreams but no brains behind it.its one thing torries laughting at us but when oursocalledown are treating us like sheep what would you have them do jess Philips prime caraline flint chancellor?scare the bejeus out of them after all they are jumped up toffs if we are not to have people rull over us who abore us then we need good strong people on those benches

    Reply ↓

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