Vulnerable people in Argyll and Bute are to be given additional Government money to help meet the cost of heating their homes during the current cold spell.
These eligible for these extra Cold Weather Payments will receive £25 towards heating costs for each seven day period of average sub-zero temperatures.
Residents who are eligible for the extra payment do not need to claim. The payment, which is over and above the Winter Fuel Payments made to those people over 60, will automatically be paid to them.
The Scheme runs from 1st November 2009 to 31st March 2010 and, to date, many vulnerable people in Argyll and Bute have qualified for this assistance.
They range from people in the worst affected areas such as parts of Bute and Cowal and Helensburgh and Lomond, who should have received up to four Cold Weather Payments; to lesser affected areas in Mid Argyll and Kintyre where, to date, vulnerable customers should have received one such extra payment to help with their heating costs.
Councillor George Freeman, Argyll and Bute’s Spokesperson for Housing and Communities, welcomed news of the additional money, saying: ‘This is crucial ongoing support from the Government, which will go some way towards helping some of the most vulnerable members of our communities to meet their extra heating costs.
‘We are in the middle of what is an extreme spell of weather, and it is very important that the elderly and other vulnerable people are not suffering unnecessarily by thinking they cannot afford to heat their homes’.
People on certain qualifying benefits – such as those on Pension Credit – are automatically eligible to receive the Cold Weather Payments. Under certain circumstances, those in receipt of other benefits such as Income Support, Income based Job Seekers Allowance or Income Related Employment Support Allowance can also qualify to receive the payments.
Cold Weather Payments will not affect individuals’ entitlement to other benefits.
Customers will generally receive payments within a week of the payment being triggered. Anyone who thinks they should have received such a payment but hasn’t should contact their Pension Centre or Jobcentre Plus.
Full information on eligibility, plus a postcode search facility where customers can find out if Cold Weather Payments have been triggered in their area, is available on this website.
It wou;d be interesting to learn of where the trigger points are in an authority as diverse as Argyll & Bute that determines where emergency payments are made. I am told that payments in Lorn are determined by temperatures that are read at Machrihanish-surely not!
I remember when the late Margaret Ewing was an MP she discovered that some of her constituents who lived on the Braes of Glenlivet, great country for whisky but a locality where wolves might still roam the higher ground searching for caribou, their emergency payments rarely came through because the control point for them was at RAF KInloss on the benign Moray coast. While these localities are not far distant on a small scale map they are worlds apart in climate terms.
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