Right-wing media watch: Telegraph’s latest benefits shock story is all hot air
The WaterSure scheme is hardly a mass giveaway, nor is it a loophole allowing people to water their lawns and fill their swimming pools while rubbing their hands in glee that they’re cheating the system.
Scrolling through the front pages this week, one story made me stop and scroll back up. Tucked away in the bottom corner of the Daily Telegraph‘s front page on July 14 was the headline: “No hosepipe ban if you’re on benefits.”
It certainly sounds like a scandal. The paper’s ‘exclusive’ claims to reveal that benefits claimants have been given permission to ignore hosepipe bans.
Except that’s not what the story says.
A few paragraphs in, readers discover the truth: the exemption applies to customers on the WaterSure tariff, a long-established scheme that caps water bills for households on low incomes with high essential water use. That includes many disabled people, families with medical needs and larger households whose water consumption is unavoidable. Customers using water for non-essential purposes, such as filling swimming pools or running sprinklers, are not exempt.
The Telegraph even quotes Southern Water and Affinity Water, whose customers have been subject to hosepipe bans since last week. Both companies explain that the exemption exists to protect vulnerable customers and avoid unnecessary confusion. Affinity Water says the vast majority of WaterSure customers are also on its Priority Services Register, while Southern Water says a complicated exemption system would create “confusion and anxiety” for vulnerable people.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation.
But the Telegraph is not interested in a fair discussion about protecting disabled people or ensuring households with essential water needs are not penalised. Instead, it turns the story into another culture war over benefits.
Enter Suella Braverman, who declares it is “ridiculous” that people on benefits are allowed to ignore the hosepipe ban, before claiming it is another example of “Labour’s two-tier Britain” where “aspiration and hard work are punished.”
Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake is also drafted in to denounce the policy, saying: “It beggars belief that people getting reduced water bills at the expense of everyone else are exempt from this hosepipe ban.”
By the time the water companies’ explanations appear near the end of the article, the damage has already been done. Many readers will have absorbed the front-page implication that benefit claimants are receiving yet another unfair privilege, even though the exemption is based on essential need rather than welfare status.
The numbers make the outrage look even more contrived. WaterSure is a niche scheme used by an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 households across England and Wales. It’s hardly a mass giveaway, nor is it a loophole allowing people to water their lawns and fill their swimming pools, while rubbing their hands in glee that they’re cheating the system.
For once, I find myself agreeing with the water companies. Their approach is about making sure disabled people, and other vulnerable customers are not put at risk.
The Telegraph meanwhile is repackaging a narrowly targeted exemption designed to protect some of the country’s most vulnerable households as evidence of preferential treatment for “people on benefits.”
But, sigh, why are we surprised?
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