Brown woos grey vote with a shower of sweeteners

Brown woos grey vote with a shower of sweeteners

The age group most likely to vote in a general election - Britain's 11 million pensioners - were yesterday sweetened with free bus passes and a £200 council tax bonus in a giveaway estimated at £1.25bn.

In a budget that spread its jam thinly among children, low-income families and first-time buyers, the chancellor saved the biggest helping for pensioners. The £200 council tax bonus - to be paid to over-65s alongside the £200 winter fuel allowance just before Christmas - is double last year's handout and will cost the Treasury £800m.

Free bus passes came as a welcome surprise to campaigners for the elderly and will include all disabled people as well - but will not begin until April 2006, will be off-peak only, and are restricted to local rather than national bus or coach routes.

The chancellor proclaimed that the measures will be "fairer and worth more to more pensioners than all other proposed schemes". Other sweeteners to encourage the grey vote included an abolition of "hotel charges" for long-stay NHS patients and a commitment to raise the pen sion credit by 13% by 2008, in line with average earnings.

Some of the handouts have a short shelf life. The £200 council tax bonus will be a one-off payment only, while the winter fuel payment could fall from £200 to £150 in 2006-07, since the commitment to £200 is only for the life of this parliament.

David Willetts, the shadow pensions.....continued below

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secretary, said: "This means that pensioners will get £250 a year less in 2006-07 than in 2005-06. Gordon Brown is offering money to pensioners now, but after the election he plans to hit them with a £5 a week cut in their benefits. Labour are offering jam tomorrow but rarely has a chancellor so cynically planned to take the jam away the day after."

Free bus passes for every pensioner formed the final flourish of the chancellor's budget speech and campaigning groups welcomed a move that will end a postcode lottery of free travel.

Pensioners in Scotland and Wales have enjoyed free bus passes since April 2001, but in England, a patchwork of local authority deals and half-price arrangements will now be replaced by a single national scheme, estimated to cost the Treasury £420m a year.

The chancellor's pledge to abolish hotel charges at the NHS will affect a relatively small number of pensioners. It extends a change introduced in April 2003, when the charge, deducted from the patient's pension and benefits after they had been in hospital for only six weeks, was scrapped. Since then, patients have only been charged if they were in hospital for a year or more.

The overall package of measures won the support of Help the Aged and Age Concern, but both remain deeply hostile to the pension credit system.

Richard Wilson of Help the Aged said: "The continuing problems of poor administration and low take-up mean that, more than a year after the pension credit was launched, millions of older people are missing out on their entitlements. Less than half of those who are only eligible for the savings credit element have made a claim."