11. Mr Gaston asked the Minister for Communities what discussions he had with his Executive colleagues to identify savings to retain winter fuel payments for all pensioners. (AQO 776/22-27)

As I have said, I strongly disagree with, and am totally opposed to, the Labour Government's decision to change the winter fuel payment eligibility criteria. I am very concerned about the serious consequences that it will have on the comfort, well-being and health of older people across Northern Ireland. I circulated a paper for Executive discussion, detailing the implications of the changes to the winter fuel payment following the Chancellor's statement. The paper outlined the estimated £44·3 million of additional costs, excluding additional delivery and staffing costs, to the block grant of maintaining the universal payment. The paper also estimated the cost of delivering an appropriate IT system to deliver universal winter fuel payments in Northern Ireland to be between £5 million and £8 million, with a further 20% of the development spend per annum for support and maintenance.

The Member will be aware that, in order for me to have stood still this year in the Department, an additional £130 million would have been necessary. I received £13 million. I have already had to make significant savings this year. I did not have the room in my budget to enable the payment to continue. However, as I have said on many occasions, not only did we not have the budget available but we did not have the means to deliver it due to the absence of a suitable IT system.

I thank the Minister for his answer. We have heard much talk about the problem with the computer system. Why did that problem not arise when we broke parity on the bedroom tax?

There was a longer lead-in period for that. DWP is changing its system to allow for the changes that are taking place across the whole of the United Kingdom. We asked whether there was any capacity to allow us to do things differently, but the indications that came back were that that was not possible. The difference with the other mitigation measures that the Member raised is that those were done with a much longer lead-in period, which enabled those payments to be made.

We will now move to topical questions.