A Treasury fund built up after pensioners around the country sent in 75p cheques to protest at their low pensions increase has been secretly donated to acharity for the elderly. A Treasury fund built up after pensioners around the country sent in 75p cheques to protest at their low pensions increase has been secretly donated to acharity for the elderly.
The fund contained nearly £50 after about 40 pensioners sent in token protests by cheque and in cash this summer. Treasury ministers refused to name the charity which received the lump sum.A spokesman claimed the Treasury was worried that the charity would become “inundated” with inquiries about the Government’s donation. As a result, he said, it had been agreed to keep the identity of the charity secret. All the spokesman would say was the organisation “works with elderly people”.He added: “We didn’t want to make a big deal out of our support for them or subject them to lots of calls from the media.” The fund came to light after a former civil servant and a lifelong Labour voter from Devon, Nora Knight, revealed in a letter to The Independent in September that her 75p cheque had been cashed.Mrs Knight, 78, had addressed the cheque to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and sent it to 11 Downing Street in July.The protests underlined the intense pressure which Mr Brown has endured over pensions. They suggest that some pensioners are dissatisfied with the £6.5bn extra Mr Brown spent on benefits, such as the winter fuel allowances and the minimum income guarantee.Tomorrow, ministers and MPs will face a series of rallies led by Tony Blair’s father-in-law, Tony Booth, and organised by the National Pensioners’ Convention, ahead of Mr Brown’s pre-Budget report in the Commons on Wednesday.

The convention wants a large increase in the basic pension and a direct link to rises in earnings restored.After a petition signed by 500,000 people is handed in to Buckingham Palace, MPs will be lobbied by up to 1,000 pensioners at Parliament. Mr Booth is expected to speak alongside the former Labour minister Baroness Castle of Blackburn and the TUC leader John Monks in central London.As a direct result of Mrs Knight’s complaints, it emerged yesterday that the Treasury has also abandoned an historic convention that all cheques and donations sent to it are cashed and the money put in the Consolidated Fund.When the first protest cheques began arriving, the Treasury changed policy by putting the money in a special holding account until ministers decided how to respond. Officials had considered sending the money back to each individual protester, with a letter defending government policy on pensions That option was rejected and the account closed In future, pensions protest cheques will not be cashed. “It had been standard practice but when we realised, we sorted it out,” the spokesman said yesterday.. Chancellor Gordon Brown today refused to bow to demands for a huge fuel tax cut, claiming it would lead to a return of the “boom and boost” economy of the 1980s.

Chancellor Gordon Brown today refused to bow to demands for a huge fuel tax cut, claiming it would lead to a return of the “boom and boost” economy of the 1980s.
Mr Brown told the Confederation of British Industry that cuts as high as 26p a litre, as called for by protest groups, were unaffordable.And he insisted higher interest rates would follow almost immediately if fuel duty was cut.At the conference in Birmingham, Mr Brown said the average mortgage holder was around £1,000-a-year better off because the cost of borrowing over the past three years had been on average 4 percent lower than it had been over the previous two decades, all of which would be jeopardised by big tax cuts.Addressing the CBI ahead of Wednesday’s pre-Budget report, he said there must be no return to the “short-termist” economics of the 1980s.”With our prudence matched by higher productivity, Britain can grasp the great interest rate prize that has eluded us for a generation – a long-term future of low and stable interest and mortgage rates upon which people can rely and business can plan ahead,” he said.”But this would all be put at risk if unaffordable demands such as for cuts in fuel duties of up to 26p were met on Wednesday with interest rates rising soon after.”. Gordon Brown would be horrified at the idea of such a rash investment, but a firm of City bookmakers is taking bets on how many times the Chancellor uses the word “prudence” in this week’s pre-Budget report. Gordon Brown would be horrified at the idea of such a rash investment, but a firm of City bookmakers is taking bets on how many times the Chancellor uses the word “prudence” in this week’s pre-Budget report.
To make matters worse for the financially cautious, the book has been opened by City Index, which specialises in spread betting – a form of gambling where the losses can be unpredictable.Mr Brown has made prudence his favourite verbal weapon as he has toiled to convince the City that a Labour Chancellor can keep tight control on the public purse strings.Ed Nicholson, the betting company’s head of marketing, said: “In his pre-Budget speech of two years ago, Gordon Brown declared that, ‘We will always be prudent’. Since then, he has been true to his words.”This reached a peak in March this year, when Mr Brown’s Budget was entitled “Prudent for a Purpose”. His accompanying speech to the Commons included seven uses of the words prudence, imprudence, prudent or imprudent.City Index is inviting people to stake between £1 and £50 on whether Mr Brown will utter his beloved buzzword more or less times than the two to three uses which the firm’s experts are predicting.Mr Nicholson claimed that guessing the number of allusions to the Chancellor’s pet subject was, in theory, less taxing than predicting other crucial questions, such as how many times he will sip water and how long he will take to deliver his speech.But Treasury sources indicated that Mr Brown could go against form. The term “prudent” might not even appear in the title of the PBR, which is expected to be called Building Long-Term Prosperity For All..