Pensioner SLAMS Labour as food bank and warm hub usage shoots up after winter fuel cut – ‘We still have dignity!’

A pensioner has slammed Labour for its treatment of pensioners saying: ‘they don’t seem to grasp most of us still have dignity and don’t deserve to be treated this way.’

Alan Bristow, 74, from northwest England, says he has many pensioner friends who are struggling to make ends meet as they just miss out on pension credit, barring them from winter fuel support.

He said: “The government seem to lack any empathy for pensioners. Statements such as ‘I didn’t want to do it’ just don’t wash.”

Mr Bristow was referring to Sir Keir Starmer and his cabinet’s standard response to outcry over recent measures affecting Britain’s elderly.

They include slashing the winter fuel payment, subjecting pensions to inheritance tax and penalising elderly farmers who die in the next seven years with inheritance tax.

Labour has committed to raising the state pension in line with inflation, however.

The former, unpopular measures are being spun by Labour as difficult but necessary decisions to fill the £22billion black hole left by the Tories.

Critics have highlighted if the government was serious about this claim they would not have awarded a 14 per cent pay rise for train drivers who were on £60,000pa for a four-day week.

They say Labour is rewarding the unions after it received £2.5million in donations from unions in the recent General Election.

Mr Bristow continued: “I know many people are suffering because they have a small occupational pension which just takes them over the threshold for pension credits. They are finding things extremely difficult.

“If you just miss out on pension credits people are increasingly using food banks and ‘warm hubs’.

“The key thing they don’t seem to grasp is that most pensioners still have dignity and don’t deserve to be treated this way.”

Many food banks across Britain have been reporting an increase in the number of pensioners using their services.

For example, Bow Foodbank in Bethnal Green, east London, says it has had to change the way it provides services due to demand becoming “unmanageable”.

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Joanna Read, executive director, said since she started working there a year and a half ago, the number of pensioners using their services has risen from 17 to up to 70 a week.

Warm hubs have also been opening to support pensioners who can’t afford to heat their home after losing winter fuel payments.

Warm Welcome, a leading campaign group, have reported 500 new warm hubs opening across Britain since October, embroiling Keir Starmer in a hypocrisy row.

This is because Starmer, as Leader of the Opposition, described warm hubs as “evidence” of the Tories’ failure to protect people in 2022.

During an interview, Sir Keir said it was “serious and tragic” people needed to use warm banks and that it was “powerful evidence of the failure of [the government]” and that “we shouldn’t need that in 21st century Britain”.

Charities have accused Starmer of “pure hypocrisy” after one of his first moves in government was the winter fuel raid.

Mr Bristow continued: “I always remember from a young age I was encouraged to pay into a pension to help me in later life.

“Now I realise what a joke this was as it just means you are entitled to nothing in this government’s eyes.

“It goes back to the classic saying ‘if you have nothing you are entitled everything.”