Born too late... or how bureaucrats are making a fuel of me

As someone over 60, I was looking forward to receiving my £200 winter fuel payment for the first time this winter - but I discovered that I was ineligible because my birthday happens to fall in the last quarter of the year.

Claimants are entitled to the money only if they turn 60 during or before the qualifying week, which for this winter was 15-22 September last year. This is supposedly to ensure that payments can be made before Christmas. Yet claims take about eight weeks to process and can be made any time up to the end of March - so it's feasible that some payments won't be made until the end of May!

This discriminates against people born between 22 September and 31 December. The original qualifying date was in January 1998, so it's possible to run the system with a later cut-off date. Why must those who turn 60 later in the year have to forfeit their first year's payment?

The Department for Work and Pensions says:

'There are about 8 million households eligible for the payment, which is made in batches, not individually - so if you made a claim in January, whether at the beginning or the end of the month, your money would be sent, for example, by March.

The reason the qualifying date has leapt around so much is that the payment was originally announced in the Chancellor's pre-Budget speech in November 1997, so the qualifying date had to be January. The following year it was in November, but since then it has always been in September.

Choosing September means we can guarantee that payments will go out in time for Christmas - and that's when people like to have the money, when the first of the winter fuel bills will be arriving. We can guarantee this even if everyone claimed in September, and the vast majority of pay ments already go out during that period.

We sympathise with this gentleman's complaint but we have to set some date. And his suggestion of 31 December is no fairer than September, as it would exclude anyone born on 1 January. The same would happen if you moved the cut-off date to the end of January, or to the end of the tax year.

Unfortunately, no matter what date we use there will be some people who miss out by a few days.'