note: ’tis the season for yet another bleak tale full of misery and woe, as is my christmas tradition. it is a relatively low-key effort compared with last year. in fact, writing it made me like the Santa vs The Elves story more. i might go so far as to recommend you read / listen to that again. i think this year’s entry is a bit less exciting in the plot, and the ending feels a little rushed, on reflection. it makes me feel like it should have been the rehearsal piece for last year’s story. but i will leave you to judge. it’s a parallel brit universe type of story, centred on an imagined outcome of the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. you can read / listen to it below. i do hope you like it, despite my misgivings.
features a sample from RyanKingArt. apologies to The Salvation Army.
cash is cold comfort
The problem, as it ever is, was speculation.
Or at least, that’s what Ken thinks, as he tries to keep his flat warm by throwing whatever he can find at his living room fireplace.
KEN: It’s greed, pure and simple.
Ken is one of the victims of a Christmas scam that at one point threatened to take down the entire nation’s economy, just at a time when it was most in need of good cheer.
Now the 60-year-old from Canning Town is reduced to burning his most flammable possessions to stave off the freezing cold. Some of them include papers from his time in the military. ‘I’ve no use for them’, the retired serviceman says. Surely he wants to leave a record of what he achieved in his lifetime, to his family, though? He shakes his head at the thought of it.
KEN: I have nothing to prove to them. Besides, what exactly would I be showing them? Proof that I served in Iraq and Afghanistan? Failed missions in Basra and Fallujah and other places they’ve never heard of and will never go to? No, no thanks! I’m trying to forget about all that. It was horrible. The only good war I ever fought in was the Falklands, and even then I my saw my best mate’s legs get blown off. War ain’t pretty, you know! At least Thatcher, she knew better than to drag us into conflicts we couldn’t finish.
Living alone - his wife died during peak COVID, ‘not of it’ he insists - made him a prime target of self-made entrepreneur Charlie Millions, whose home furnishings and mod cons empire is under fire for its part in what has been dubbed the cold cash scandal.
Ken started to feel the heat - or lack of it - after the annual Budget in November, when the chancellor announced a programme of sweeping cuts to balance the nation’s books, which included scrapping the winter fuel allowance.
The move had the effect of hiking the average pensioner’s heating bill 150%, tipping the fragile state of Ken’s finances into the negative, and like hundreds of his peers, seek help, which he thought he’d found in an advert he saw at his local post office.
Millions came up with the CASH4HEATERS scheme as a benevolent mission to provide warmth and comfort to those ‘who the government had abandoned to the cold in their hour of need’.
MILLIONS: … it’s disgraceful to think that there is a generation of people who have served their country in so many ways over so many years, and this is the thanks they get? It’s not on!
For a fee, anyone of pensionable age could order one of his new e-heaters over the counter, while stocks lasted, as part of Charlie’s so-called ‘affordable heating initiative’. The notable feature of his scheme - and what appealed to many eligible customers including Ken - was that it was cash-only.
KEN: Suits me, I didn’t want to use any of that plastic money and owe anyone for it!
The venture proved so popular that Millions had reportedly sold thousands of units by Black Friday. The unexpected struggle to keep up with demand led his company Haringey Heaters to suspend deliveries temporarily, but the businessman promised that all orders made by the end of the first December weekend would be delivered by the last weekend before Christmas, insisting that his staff could ‘handle it’.
The runaway success of the CASH4HEATERS scheme had a damaging knock-on effect on post office branches across the country. An estimated 85% of customers who ordered the e-heaters withdrew cash for their purchases at on-site ATMs, driving post office capital reserves to critical lows. But on the morning of 3 December, after a public endorsement from Lorraine Kelly on Good Morning Britain, a surge in orders forced upward of 200 subpostmasters to close their doors indefinitely owing to a shortage of available funds, tipping a seasonal liquidity issue into a full blown crisis.
All of a sudden, the post office found itself at the centre of a kind of contagion where the sight of growing numbers of pensioners queueing to withdraw their money outside the remaining available branches with limited opening hours brought back painful memories of the run on Northern Rock in 2007. An unintended side-effect of money shortages is that they remind everyone else how little they have.
Both England’s and Ireland’s central bank governors moved swiftly to quell speculation, releasing a joint statement assuring consumers that all of their money would remain safe, and not to worry about recent events.
GOVERNOR: Look here. Speculation of a bank run on the post office is ridiculously overblown
… said the Bank of England chief, partly because of the misconception that pensioners banked with the post office. In fact, an estimated 60% of CASH4HEATERS customers’ deposits were held by the Bank of Ireland, many of whom were unaware that their Post Office Money savings were actually branded products under a Post Office Limited wrapper.
This did not prevent a meltdown on the financial markets. Within 48 hours, the FTSE 100 fell 15%, its biggest 2-day loss since 2008. But none of this was unusual for the Bank of England governor: past experiences prepared him for dealing with monetary shocks. He authorised the provision of a liquidity support facility - an invention from his time as chief cashier at the onset of the financial crash - to the Bank of Ireland, dependent on passing a series of stress tests for each loan payment.
And so, a national institution was saved from ruin thanks to the Bank of England’s long-term recovery plan, according to media reports. Bailout Banker Boss to the rescue, the headlines announced, with more than one newspaper depicting the governor as a reformed Scrooge-figure in a postal worker’s outfit dishing out sackfuls of money to all those around him.
This left the problem of the e-heaters themselves. All units shipped to customers in time, as Charlie Millions had promised. But within days, Haringey Heaters were flooded with complaints over the purchases, many of which had caught fire. It just so happened that Ken’s incident made the news, as the nation learnt of a pensioner’s brush with a death trap that caused tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage to his bedroom quarters. Ken told the media he feels ‘lucky to be alive, for now’ but that the nights spent sleeping on his freezing cold floor since could be his last.
The public outcry sparked by Ken’s misfortune triggered consumer watchdog Which? to investigate. A test of several units found the internal circuitry and wiring was very poor, with some either missing key components or supplied with the wrong parts. One of the heaters had an illegal plug and a fake fuse.
A separate probe conducted by the Office for Product Safety and Standards adjudged the e-heaters to present a fire and explosion hazard and recommended Haringey Heaters be held liable for failing to act on what they likely knew about how the units were assembled.
Responding to the national regulator’s statement from his mansion in Marbella, Millions denied any wrongdoing, claimed that the majority of the e-heaters did in fact work, and suggested that customers whose units broke send them in for fixing at the standard service charge.
MILLIONS: I will never apologise for trying to meet the urgent need of hundreds of thousands of retirees across the country, where the government couldn’t. Situations like this prove how this economy needs doers and go-getters like me to help it function. Unfortunately, the way things are, me and my employees need heating too, and that costs.
Commentators gossiped about how his response exhibited little of the goodwill shown when he first launched the CASH4HEATERS initiative and gave no mention of a refund for faulty stock. But there is room for only one Scrooge every Christmas, and the depiction of the generous banker version in the tabloids made news editors uncomfortable with conjuring comparisons in their readers’ minds if they repeated the trick with Millions.
Many of the customers we contacted said they felt cheated. Ken jokes that he now knows to ‘beware a businessman bearing discounted gifts’.
KEN: Buy cheap, and you buy twice, eh?
But he does not blame Millions entirely for the fiasco. The pensioner believes that if it weren’t for the government’s decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance, then he wouldn’t have needed to turn elsewhere for help.
KEN: The government has ruined things for… ordinary folk like me. Just becase I’m not on handouts doesn’t mean I can afford to lose income, wherever it comes from. Let’s be clear, I have no problem with them trying to make sure we don’t fall further into debt, I just don’t think they should be doing it off the backs of us pensioners, who’ve done the hard graft and been promised an affordable retirement.
As Ken hunkers down for another night on his wooden floor, he might draw some comfort from the fact that the government have moved swiftly to set up an inquiry into the scandal. The house of commons finance committee chair has invited Charlie Millions to give evidence at a public hearing in late May. The entire process is estimated to take at least 4 years at a cost of millions of pounds to the public purse, but the chancellor insists that a far reaching and forensically thorough inquiry is needed to identify the root causes of the scandal, by which time Ken might be able to afford a new bed.
cash is cold comfort.png