The Department of Works and Pensions (DWP) will be giving benefits claimants the £10 Christmas ‘bonus’ again this week. The woefully low yearly payment feels like even more of an insult in a year full of hate levelled at disabled benefits claimants. And it definitely won’t help towards the cost of a Christmas dinner.
Each December, the DWP gives recipients of non-means-tested benefits an extra £10. That includes many disabled and older people, who struggle to make ends meet at this time of year. This is supposed to help towards the cost of Christmas, but just £10 doesn’t make a dent in all the extra costs of the holiday period.
Really, DWP? £10? You’re taking the PIP
Despite benefits going up in line with inflation every year, the Christmas bonus has stayed the same. When the ‘bonus’ was first introduced in 1972, £10 went a long way. As the Canary’s Steve Topple previously wrote, back then a Christmas dinner cost around £3.34. However, in 2025, it barely even buys a round of drinks.
In fact, if you were to try and buy a Christmas dinner with your bonus, you’d struggle massively. With the cost of shopping inflated even more over the festive period you’ll be hard pushed to even buy a bird for your table never mind a whole meal. The cheapest turkey is £9.50 in Asda, so you’d have a whole 50p to spare. If you’re stuck for ideas of how to buy the rest of a dinner with 50p, I’m sure Lee Anderson could help.
If you were to forgo the meat and just have yorkshires, a few potatoes each, a bit of veg and some gravy, you could probably do it. But that’s far from “all the trimmings”, isn’t it? Though it’s probably what the right-wing tossers think benefit claimants deserve.
Christmas bonus should be thirty-four times higher.
We know the Christmas bonus is an insult, but when you work out just how much it should be now, the whole thing feels like a piss take. When the bonus was first introduced in 1972, only pensioners got it, and back then, they got £6.75 a week. However, pensioners now get £230.25 a week.
So, going off that rate of inflation, benefit claimants should be getting around £341 extra at Christmas time. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that’s thirty-four times what we get now.
That’s an amount of money that would actually make a difference at Christmas. It would pay for Christmas dinner and a chunk of presents. With the cost of things now, it might still be a modest Christmas, but at least it would actually help, as opposed to giving us a couple of quid and expecting us to be grateful
Government doesn’t care about disabled people enjoying Christmas
More than anything, the biggest insult of the whole charade is to call it a “bonus”. As if it’s something the government has graciously awarded to us urchins for being good little deserving disableds and poors. This feels like even more bullshit this year, when all we’ve had for months on end is constant rhetoric around how lazy we all are and that we should all be stripped of our benefits.
If the government actually wanted to support disabled and poorer people over the festive period, they would give us a Christmas payment that would make a difference. But the only difference they care about is point scoring against the Tories and Reform, who hate us even more.
Featured image via the Canary
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