Report to the People
4th February 2008
Turning up the Heat on Delays
What,
exactly, is the point of weather forecasters coming on and telling you what the
weather has been like?
We don’t need Peter Sloss or his Met Office super-computers to tell us
that it’s been, to use the technical meteorological term, brass monkeys.
Miserable
as it may be, though, it’s no great hardship for those of us lucky enough to
spend the day working inside. We
might need to brave ice-cold wind and lashing rain on the pitch-black commute to
and from work, but at least we can fire up the central heating and thaw out when
we get home.
What,
though, about pensioners who are at home all day with no central heating?
As
you know, for years there has been a government programme which gives free
central heating packages to pensioners who have none or whose system has broken
beyond repair.
But
it’s falling apart.
I
am currently representing a number of elderly constituents who have been told to
sit and shiver until June. And, as
was revealed in Holyrood on Thursday, the average waiting time is now nearly 8
months - double what it was in May. Back
then, 1,000 pensioners were on the waiting list.
Now, over 6,500 have to wait more than 3 months.
I
raised these pensioners’ plight with the Communities Minister when he appeared
before my Committee months ago and now it’s with the First Minister. It’s
high time they took action, before this rotten winter becomes a frozen
pensioner’s last.
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