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With all the focus on frozen income tax thresholds, much less attention has been paid to another figure that is likely to be frozen for years to come - the £35,000 cut-off for losing your winter fuel payment. And this week the Government confirmed that, because of this freeze, the number of pensioners who miss out is set to rise every year for the foreseeable future.

At the moment, if your total income from your state pension, company pension and other sources is under £35,000, you get to keep your winter fuel payment. But what if your income is currently below £35,000 but rises each year simply to keep pace with inflation? The fact that the threshold is frozen means that there is an increasing chance with every passing year that you will go over the limit and then have to start paying back your winter fuel payment.

This seems to me to be a particularly sneaky approach.

When the Government did its U-turn on the winter fuel payment earlier this year, it suggested that only the richest two million pensioners would lose out.

This week, they have increased that figure to 2.2million, and the number losing out will keep increasing until they do something about the £35,000 cut-off.

Before long, something that was meant only to bite on the most well-off will start to hit hundreds of thousands more pensioners, many of them only basic rate taxpayers, and by no means rich.

When the new system was introduced, the Government should have put in place an automatic annual increase in the £35,000 cut-off to avoid large numbers of pensioners gradually being caught simply because of inflation.

It is time for them to commit to raising the limit every year rather than use this as another opportunity to let inflation gradually erode the living standards of Britain's pensioners.