00:00Stettings Town Council is committed to signing this Save the Winterfjord Pavement for Struggling
00:06Pensioners petition, which is being run by Age Concern.
00:10This really brings in light both the District Council and the County Council, who have already
00:17gone along, excuse me while I'm issuing the transition, I believe they've already gone
00:24along these lines. I mean obviously the removal of the Winterfjord allowance is a really,
00:32really bad policy. Now I fully understand that people say well it actually, it's only
00:38the vulnerable, it's only the vulnerable pensioners that are actually going to, that
00:47are not going to be affected by this because the vulnerable pensioners are only getting
00:53pension credits. However, what else it will do is it will create another level of vulnerability
01:04because if you are just over the cut-off, which I think is about £11,450, if you are
01:14only £11,600, you cannot get pension credit. So what's actually happened is somebody that
01:28gets pension credit will have £11,450 up to and then it will have £300 on top of
01:38that, so they'll actually have £11,750. Whereas somebody that's got £11,600, they
01:45will have £11,900 but they are actually now having less money than somebody on pension
01:54credits and it really doesn't make any sense. The motion in front of us is as read and I
02:06hope the council will back this motion because I do think we need to make, we need to give
02:14as much support to our elderly people in this town as possible. Maybe I should declare an
02:20interest being a pensioner myself but I mean that's something. The other thing I'd like
02:29to say is with us being a seaside resort, our elderly population is well over the mean
02:41average for a normal, for want of a better word, community. When I was a practice manager
02:49at a medical practice, we would be running at between 140 and 160% of the actual mean
03:03average we should have based on the statistics. So please back this and thank you very much.
03:13Is there a seconder?
03:15Yes, I'll hold on to the seconder's motion and reserve a lot of the right to speak if
03:21they want to speak now.
03:23Anyone want to speak?
03:25We don't want to be heard.
03:27Anyone want to speak?
03:29I'm supporting the council over there. We know that the government said that there's
03:37this huge gap in the budget and they needed to fill it by making cuts. Now if those figures
03:45are correct, then obviously you've got to make some financial adjustment. But I do feel
03:51that they could have looked at some area of expenditure which was less sensitive. It's
03:57ironic, isn't it, that this particular measure was introduced by the last Labour government
04:03but by Gordon Brown and then there's a gap of some 14 years and then the current government
04:09decides to get rid of it. I think that, as Councillor O'Dea has pointed out, any blanket
04:19sort of measure that the government puts, there's bound to be inequality in it. But
04:23I do feel that we all live in this area. There are a good many people that, as Councillor
04:31O'Dea said, are hovering on that limit. We now know that the fuel tax went up by 10
04:41per cent so that's further going to turn the ratchet, so to speak. I think that the motion
04:47presented here, it states it all and I would hope that colleagues around this table would
04:55support it because there's organisations such as Age UK, they support it. It's not necessarily
05:03just our council. I mean, everybody's going to be affected to some degree on this and
05:09I think if, and also, let's face it, there's been tremendous support from every government
05:13that have expressed reservations about this particular thing so it's not, there is a
05:19grand sum of people that think that the whole measure would not fall through so that's why
05:25I'm supporting Councillor O'Dea.
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