WINTER BOUNTY

A payment of £200 appeared in my bank account this morning. I'm a freelance journalist so in itself that is not so unusual. But this payment wasn't a fee for work. Nor was it a payment for something I'd sold. Nor a gift from a kind friend. Unless you count Iain Duncan Smith as a friend. Because Iain's Department for Work and Pensions sent me £200 tax free this week just because I was born before 6 July 1952.

The Winter Fuel Payment was introduced by Gordon Brown in 1997. It was £20 then and put up in successive years by Gordon and then Alistair Darling to reach £250 in winter 2008. The final £50 – technically an addition to the £200 payment – was taken away for winter 2011 by the Coalition. That was one of its first austerity measures and one of the very few that have affected pensioners. Since then the Winter Fuel Payment has been (ahem) frozen at £200 per household and £300 if one person in the home is at least 80 (technically born before 22 September 1934). Its purpose is to help old folk with the cost of keeping warm in the winter.

Although free money is always nice, I don't need it. I haven't been worried, as many people are, about the cost of heating my home when it gets cold. And because it is tax free and I earn enough to pay higher rate tax it is worth the same to me as earning £333.33. So thank you Gordon for inventing it and Iain for continuing to pay it.

I am not sending it back. Nor am I giving it to Age UK or any other charity which helps people over a certain age cope with their heating bills. I prefer to concentrate what charitable giving I do on young homeless people. By gift-aiding this tax free payment it will be worth £250 - another £50 from George Osborne - when it reaches the charity. And if I give £267 the charity will get £334 and, when I settle my self-assessment tax bill, it will have cost me just 25p.

So thank you Iain and George for giving me a bit more money to help the growing number of young people left destitute by your sanctions (taking their benefit away if they fail to jump through all the JobCentre hoops). Left unhoused by councils whose government grants you have cut. And left with nothing by employers who want them to turn up as and when there is a bit of minimum wage work and go away unpaid if there is none, because your Government has not legislated to end zero hours contracts.

Happy Christmas

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