“Everyone who needs to get winter fuel payments will get them, because pensioners on pension credit will get them,” Torcuil Crichton tells welovestornoway.com.
As he heads towards three months at Westminster, Na h-Eileanan an Iar’s first Labour MP in almost two decades is responding to local SNP branch criticism of the Labour government’s “iniquitous removal of winter fuel payments”.
In a statement marking the 10th anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum, SNP branch chair Angus MacDonald highlighted “heart-rending stories” from people in the Western Isles who are worried about the cost of running medical equipment on top of rising heating costs.
Crichton counters that the Scottish government’s own independent advisers, the Poverty & Inequality Commission, accept that the universality of the winter fuel payment means it is ill-targeted and doesn’t alleviate poverty.
“The SNP MPs in Westminster are opposing what their own government is going to do tomorrow,” he says, dismissing the notion that the Scottish government’s decision to scrap the payment is connected to funding from Westminster.
“The block grant has increased,” he says. “They make their own decisions.”
The priority now is finding those pensioners who are eligible for pensions credit but haven’t applied for it, Crichton adds. There could be as many as 1,000 pensioners in that category in the Western Isles. The benefit could be worth up to £3,000 per year to them and can be backdated for three months.
“It’s really important to find these people,” Crichton says. “The way to do that is for people to fill in the form online, to get help from the Citizens Advice bureau or to get in touch with me. Right now, I’m a one-man band, but by next month I hope to have staff and an office in Lewis, and I will have caseworkers who will help people to find that pension credit if they are entitled to it.”
The winter fuel payments debacle has been part of a torrid first three months both for the new Labour government and for Na h-Eileanan an Iar’s new MP. While the government has battled allegations of excessive gift-taking as it apprises the public of an alleged £20 billion black hole in the public finances left by the previous Conservative government, Crichton has faced crises at flagship local businesses.
“The first week was Bakkafrost, and the second week was Arnish,” he says.
The collapse of Harland and Woolf, which owns the Arnish yard, shows how intertwined the national and the local are. The Office for Budget Responsibility is now investigating the Conservative Government's Treasury for not being honest with them about their spending plans, and the resultant mess means tough decisions have been necessary. One such is the decision not to grant the £200 million loan guarantee that Harland and Woolf wanted to keep it afloat.
“Labour came in and looked at the books and said 'No',” says Crichton. “It wouldn’t have touched the sides of the Arnish yard. It would have gone straight to New York to the financiers. It wouldn’t have saved a single job.”
That decision made, it may be time to decouple Arnish from the wider Harland and Woolf project and emphasise the yard’s local attributes. The Arnish yard is well situated in the northwest Atlantic where the renewables industry is expanding and is involved in fabrication for that industry rather than being a shipbuilding company.
“The kind of solution we need in Scotland may not be the kind of solution they need in Belfast,” says Crichton, who believes that “all the ingredients are there to keep Arnish working”. These include a skilled workforce and the yard’s location within Stornoway’s deep-water terminal.
The business secretary, John Reynolds, visited the Arnish yard in June this year when still in the shadow cabinet, and Crichton says ministers are across the yard’s unique attributes. And helping deliver the Arnish yard, which has a wage bill of about half a million £s a month, into new ownership in a timely manner is likely to be one of the ongoing challenges of his tenure as Na h-Eileanan an Iar’s MP.
In the meantime, there’s the new government’s first budget to look forward to next month. It will be delivered in a difficult context: namely, that £20 billion black hole.
“This isn’t the £20 billion of government expenditure that everyone was talking about before the election,” Crichton says. “This is this year, which, of course, means that I can’t say we’re going to get a great budget either, because this [the winter fuel payment] is the first of series of savings.”
