Matthew Hicks SCC: Winter fuel policy terrible for Suffolk

Matthew Hicks is concerned for Suffolk pensioners over Labour's winter fuel payments policy Suffolk is crisscrossed with remote communities, with homes that are statistically less energy efficient compared to urban homes, meaning they require more energy to maintain a healthy temperature.
Furthermore, many rural homes are not connected to mains gas, forcing households to rely on more costly heating sources like wood, canister gas, or oil. 
This choice by the Chancellor could hit some 177,000 Suffolk pensioners very hard indeed.
I use the word choice quite deliberately.
Labour has chosen to give inflation-busting pay rises to already well-paid train drivers and other public sector workers. In fact, as was made clear to the Prime Minister on the Laura Kuenssberg show, £9 billion of the much vaunted “£22 billion black hole” is due to pay rises Labour have awarded to the union-dominated public sector.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves chose to give these huge pay rises, and they chose to cut winter fuel payments to save £1.5 billion.
The new Labour MPs for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, Ipswich, and Lowestoft all voted in support of this cut. While the new Labour MP for Suffolk Coastal didn’t even vote. Suffolk’s new Conservative MPs, on the other hand, all voted to retain this vital lifeline for pensioners.
Before the 2017 general election, Labour published their own impact assessment of the impact of such a choice. 
They were very clear: cutting winter fuel payments would potentially kill 4,000 pensioners and be, according to them, the "single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation". 
For all their protestations about the ‘black hole’ left by the previous Government, HM Treasury refused to give specific details about it in response to a Freedom of Information request. Presumably because those details don’t exist.
In the end, the Government chose to ignore their own warnings and opted for the very worst option, helped along the way by every Labour member of Parliament in Suffolk.

Sunnica is a 'disaster for Suffolk', Matthew says (Image: Newsquest) Labour may only have been in power for a little over ten weeks, but they are happy to make choices quickly without any real regard for the consequences of their choices on local people.  Nowhere have we seen this better in Suffolk than Ed Miliband's reckless and ill-considered choice to approve the worst large infrastructure project Suffolk has ever seen. 
The Sunnica Solar farm is not only a disaster for Suffolk's precious landscape and environment but also a disaster for farming and food production as solar panels smother thousands of acres of good quality food-producing land.
This choice by a Labour Government is another head-scratcher, however, because it wasn’t just a Conservative county council saying this was a terrible idea; the Planning Inspectorate - the professional body that really does know about this kind of thing - also thought the idea so bad that it should be thrown out.
Here again, we see a Labour Government dismiss evidence it disagrees with and rush headlong into making a terrible choice for communities across Suffolk.  This time helped by the Labour-run council in West Suffolk, who chose to pull out of our joint legal action against the decision.
We then come to the latest choice made by the Labour Government: their choice to throw two years of hard work on a new county deal for Suffolk in the bin. 
A deal which would have unlocked half a billion pounds of investment for our county, helped bring brownfield sites into use for much-needed housing, delivered clarity and money for future transport strategies, upgraded local buses to include countywide electronic ticketing and made the leader of Suffolk County Council directly accountable to the people of Suffolk.  All snatched away from you because Labour didn’t negotiate the deal themselves.
The Labour Party says it believes in devolving centralised powers to local people, just not apparently when it hasn’t negotiated the deal itself. And it doesn't matter if the deal we've spent years negotiating in good faith is popular with the people of Suffolk; no, that isn't important at all. 

All SCC's devolution efforts have been snatched away, says Matthew Hicks (Image: Archant) The government said it wants “a more ambitious deal” yet didn’t give any detail on what that looks like. Why didn’t they throw their support behind our deal as a first step, and then begin negotiations towards a “more ambitious” second deal? After all, this has happened in other areas of the country, like Manchester – which is now on its seventh devolution deal.  The vague explanation that the government has given isn’t credible - this was a political decision, plain and simple.
What the Government has done, helped by inexperienced Labour MPs, and politically selfish Labour-run district and borough councils, who urged the Government to scrap the deal so they could pretend they would have some influence over it, is thrown away all we have accomplished. They have set Suffolk back years and snatched power and investment from the hands of local people.
By choosing to scrap our hard-won county deal, this government has made another truly terrible choice for Suffolk, adding to its ever-growing catalogue of catastrophic choices for our county.