FIFTY days in, it is most peculiar that the first battle Labour has fought is with pensioners, who are to lose their universal winter fuel payment.

In the rose garden at Downing Street on Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer said that "those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden", and it appears to be pensioners who are to bear the burden for the £9bn pay rise for the public sector.

The universality of the winter fuel payment is also peculiar. It is odd that multi-millionaire pensioners get the couple of hundred pounds along with everyone else. In fact, it is galling for taxpayers to hear that comfortably-off pensioners give their payments straight to charity because they don’t need them – a noble gesture, but it is taxpayers’ money being given away when the state has plenty of uses for it.

Removing the payment from those better-off is not wrong, but the way it is being done – by removing it from those on Pension Credit or other means-tested benefits – clearly is, especially as we see how much heating costs are going up this winter.

Pension Credit is one of the most underclaimed benefits: 1.4m claim it but an estimated 880,000 households do not. Now there is a mad rush of pensioners trying to fill out the 243 boxes on 22 pages to claim the benefit, and if they all do, it will cost the Treasury £3.8bn against the £1.4bn it was hoping to save.

But it is wider than just those we do not claim the credit. Age Concern estimates that there are 2m pensioners who are going to be pushed into hardship by the Labour move, those whose modest incomes won’t qualify for Pension Credit and those whose medical conditions cause them to wrack up huge heating bills.

There has, therefore, to be a better way to remove the payment from those who don’t need them while not pushing those while really do into need them into even greater hardship.