General Secretary Sally Tsoukaris looks back on a year in which the CSPA campaigned on issues including winter fuel payments, pensioner poverty and the wider challenges facing older people across the UK.
‘Fury over winter fuel payment cuts,’ screamed a headline in The Pensioner magazine’s winter issue (December 2024) as we joined protests and campaigns for its reinstatement to prevent avoidable hardship and excess deaths over the coldest months of the year.
Perhaps due to the outrage expressed – not only by pensioners and seasoned campaigners but also by ordinary people of all ages up and down the country – on 9 June 2025 Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that the winter fuel payment of £200 per household (£300 if one person is aged 80 or over) would be extended to all pensioner households with an income of less than £35,000 a year. This extended the payments to more than nine million pensioners who had lost out the previous year.
Alongside calls for winter fuel allowance payments to be restored, the CSPA and other organisations implored the government to increase the uptake of pension credit and, to be fair, concerted efforts were made but sadly with limited success, for we are still stuck with 760,000 people being eligible but not claiming this vital support. In the UK today, the number of pensioners living in relative poverty remains stubbornly high at around 1.9 million people.
To build on the success of our Later Life Ambition’s (LLA) pensioners’ manifesto, Standing by Pensioners, published in the run-up to the July 2024 General Election, CSPA and its LLA partners, the National Association of Retired Police Officers (NARPO) and the National Federation of Occupational Pensioners (NFOP), launched the Budget for Later Life at a successful parliamentary event in late October 2025.
The event, which preceded Rachel Reeves’ autumn Budget statement, was sponsored by Kirsty Blackman MP (SNP). A range of MPs and others attending heard from her and other speakers, including Ann Davies MP (Plaid Cymru), about the challenges older people face in their constituencies.
Celebrity support came from TV presenter and author Sue Cook, and LLA was featured in a three-page spread in a national newspaper.
If you would like a printed copy of the report please email enquiries@cspa.co.uk or call HQ on 020 8688 8418 to request a copy.
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- Annual Report - Introduction 00:00
