Charity welcomes Duncan-Smith ‘clarification’

UK Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has insisted that he was neither encouraging nor discouraging wealthy pensioners to hand back their universal benefits such as the free bus pass, free TV licence or the winter fuel allowance as a means of reducing the deficit, despite a news article over the weekend that seemed to intimate this.

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He had been reported in the Sunday Telegraph as supporting such voluntary moves but today strongly denied that this was the case. He told Radio 4's Today programme that what he said was not a policy position but that because the opportunity to hand back benefits has always been available to those who felt they didn't need them, the government had provided a hotline for the purpose.

Asked if he would give up his own benefits as he's asking others to, he responded: "I'm not asking them to give up their allowances."

The cost of these benefits is roughly £3.5bn, but David Cameron has ruled out means-testing them. The idea of wealthy pensioners returning their benefits to the government was immediately rejected as unworkable by many of Duncan Smith's cabinet colleagues, and his aides stressed his suggestion in a Sunday newspaper interview was not a policy, but an aspiration.

Age Scotland spokesman Lindsay Scott said: "We welcome this clarification. The winter fuel payment and concessionary bus pass both make a real difference to many thousands of older people in Scotland. Of course it is an individual's right to decide not to make use of these benefits but when it is suggested that 'wealthier pensioners' should deliberately forego them, our worry is that some who are badly in need of extra help will feel less inclined to take it: we are aware that older people on very low incomes sometimes make light of their own problems and highlight others they know who are worse off than they are."