Labour will try to force a vote on Wednesday to urge the government to protect free TV licences for the over-75s.
The shadow culture secretary, Tom Watson, will use an opposition day debate in the House of Commons to seek to put pressure on the government over the issue. Responsibility for funding the commitment, which costs an estimated £750m a year, is being handed over to the BBC in June next year, under deal struck with David Cameron’s government in 2015.
The culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, has said he hopes the corporation will continue to fund the benefit, but the BBC has warned that it would have to close channels and make significant cuts to programming if it was to meet the cost in full.
In a consultation that closed in February, it mooted other options, including asking the over-75s to pay the full licence fee, raising the eligibility threshold to 80, or offering a discount.
The former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, who introduced the free licences policy, has urged the government to keep funding it.
In the 2017 general election manifesto, the Conservatives promised to “maintain” pensioner benefits, “including free bus passes, eye tests, prescriptions and TV licences, for the duration of this parliament”.
Watson said: “Today Tory MPs have a choice: to honour the manifesto they stood on in 2017 or to disregard it, along with the trust of millions of older people.”
Opposition day votes are not formally binding, but Labour has previously used them to draw attention to politically controversial issues, including universal credit and the climate crisis.
Watson pointed to new analysis by Age UK showing that of the 4.5 million over-75s in England, 48% do not live with a partner, 30% have difficulty with at least one daily living activity and up to 70% have a longstanding illness that limits their activities.
He said: “These new figures show just how isolated and lonely many over-75s can be. It would be a terrible act of state cruelty to take free TV away from these vulnerable people.”
Caroline Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK, said: “The government now stands alone in its determination to scrap the provision of free TV licences for all over-75s; this despite clear evidence showing how reliant many older people are on their TV, especially the lonely, chronically sick and disabled, and how hard it would be for them to afford yet another bill.
“Stripping them of their free TV licence will inevitably leave significant numbers of older people unable to watch TV, which for many is one of the few remaining pleasures in life.”
Labour is keen to curry favour with older voters, who were much more likely to vote Conservative at the 2017 general election. Jeremy Corbyn has promised to keep in place a series of other taxpayer-funded policies, including the “triple lock” on the value of the basic state pension.
