THE Government is not wrong to end the universal winter fuel allowance, but the way it has chosen to do so is not right.

It is wrong that multi-millionaire pensioners should get the couple of hundred pounds of the allowance, and to the taxpayer it is not fair that some better-off pensioners talk of giving their payments to charity because they feel they don’t need them.

However, by choosing to limit the allowance only to those on pension credit, effectively to those who get under £11,500-a-year, the Government is likely to make thousands (Age UK says two million) of just-about-getting-by pensioners extremely cold this winter.

And that is not right.

In Darlington, 18,000 of the 21,000 people who receive the allowance are going to lose it.

It is a very bad public relations look for the Government to be seen as targeting pensioners, but it is even more crazy because the sums don’t appear to add up. The Government says it is going to save £1.4bn and blames the £22bn Tory black hole, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that if every eligible pensioner claims pension credit – that’d be 880,000 new claimants – there won’t be any saving.

In terms of politics, Keir Starmer – previously accused of flip-flopping – cannot be seen to back down so pity the poor newbie backbenchers – many in our area – who are now caught between the hard politics of the whips and the real anger of their constituents. For them, the honeymoon is over.

With their help, the Government will tough this out, but, once the furore has died down, it does need to find a way of softening this blow – and quickly.