AROUND 760,000 pensioners are at risk of missing out on this loophole that could snag a £150 deduction on their energy bills.

The deadline for the discount is fast approaching to get The Warm Home Discount (WHD) which is a scheme for those receiving specific benefits.

1

According to gov.uk, The WHD is currently closed but is set to reopen this month for those who need to apply.

The program offers a one-off payment of £150 to struggling with winter bills – including the thousands on the Guarantee Credit element of Pension Credit.

This will be taken directly off you energy bill and not arrive as lump sum and in most cases you will receive the discount automatically.

Those eligible also include people who receive Universal Credit, income support and Housing Benefit.

There are a few requirements needed to apply for the scheme.

These specifications are from 2023, so if you tick these boxes for 2024 unfortunately cannot apply for the discount this winter.

If these requirements apply to you it means you are in ‘core group 2’ meaning you should be eligible to receive the £150 discount this Christmas.

When will I receive my discount?

If you are eligible, the Warm Home Discount will be applied between October and March.

Traditional prepayment meter customers are sent vouchers by post, email, text or cheque.

Once you’ve got hold of you £150 voucher youve got 90 days to redeem it at your nearest Post Office or PayPoint shop.

It will be deducted from you electricity bill but you are able to get a discount on your gas bill if your supplier provides you with both gas and electricity.

The best way to check ask about whether you can get a discount on your gas bill is by contacting your energy supplier.

What is pension credit?

Pension credit is a system created to assist with those over the state pension age, 66, with low earnings.

The benefit adds a certain amount of money each week to help pensioners who are in need of financial help.

If you are an individual receiving pension credit, the Guarantee Credit will increase your weekly income to £218.15.

If you have a partner, the benefit will be joint and it will bump up your weekly income to £332.95.

There is an additional pension credit benefit called savings credit, which, if you have savings or your income is above the basic full state pension amount.

The WHD doesn’t just apply to those on pension credit but to those receiving a range of means-tested-benefit.

To see if you are currently claiming means-tested benefits, check if your benefit is on the list below.

As befits a woman of a certain age, Nil Yalter doesn’t receive visitors until the afternoon. “I’ve been insomniac all my life,” she tells me when I arrive at what she calls her “home studio” in Paris at 3.30pm. A two-room apartment, it’s on the ground floor of a building that once housed Napoleon’s troops. “But now with all this excitement it’s even worse,” she continues. “So I get up when I want to.”

Even for a happy sleeper, it would have been an exhausting year. In April, she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, where two major works by her are being shown. Another — an early video work from 1974 — was in the exhibition Presence Arabe at the Musee de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from April to August. Ab-Anbar, a Fitzrovia gallery that transplanted itself from Tehran to London a couple of years ago, featured a retrospective of her work this summer and is also featuring her work at Frieze Masters this week. Next week visitors to Art Basel Paris in the Grand Palais will find an installation called “The AmbassaDRESS”, part of the display mounted by Istanbul gallery The Pill. 

“For years nobody cared,” says Yalter, 86, her hair scraped back, a shawl round her shoulders. But now people do — very much. The Venetian award ­— a slinky art deco cat — glimmers on a shelf. “At the beginning, they said my work wasn’t art, that it was politics and sociology. Now everyone appreciates it.” 

Indeed, Yalter’s investigations of immigration, exile, displacement and the female condition seem more pertinent than ever. “Aren’t there more people than ever who feel like they might be in the wrong place, or might need to move?” she says. Throughout her 50-year career, she has told stories of determination and loss — of language, things, sense of self — in grey-on-grey video; through images printed on fabric and sewn on to canvas banners that can be rolled up and carried across continents; and in drawings sketched on top of Polaroids. “It’s all very inexpensive, my dear,” she says. “Everything is auto-financed so it’s very cheap material. Sol LeWitt said that spending too much money on making art is cultural fascism. I believe that.”

Yalter has worked with video since the first Portapak cameras became available to her in the early 1970s — the first female artist in France to do so. “You can look at your own body, you can pre-empt the male gaze,” she says of work like “Belly Dance” (1974), in which she wrote an erotic text by Renat Nilli on her torso and made the words move as she danced. More often, though, her focus is on immigrant communities. In the video work which lines the first room of the Central Pavilion in Venice — called “Exile is a Hard Job” — Turkish men in Paris detail their lives in long monologues, from which Yalter pulls out only the occasional phrase for subtitle — “We like you, they say, but we have unemployment too” — leaving the rest of their words floating and unheard. In the centre, a felt tent evokes the lives of the women left behind in remote rural communities, the structure both protection and prison.

Yalter’s own story is one of displacement, though driven more by culture than economics. Born in Cairo into an upper-class Turkish family, she grew up in Istanbul and eventually moved to Paris. “They called me an Egyptian artist in the Biennale,” she scoffs. “I’m a French artist. I’ve been French since 1958!”

Her first marriage, at 19, was to a Breton pantomime artist and together they went on the Indian hippy trail. Shortly after she married an ambassador’s son and came to Paris. When that marriage didn’t last, she found a companion whom she was with for 45 years until his death two years ago. “It was perfect, no marriage. I say to girls even today, ‘don’t sign that paper’.”

Yalter calls herself a feminist Marxist (“in the good sense of Marxism,” she adds). Her politics were partly engendered by the Parisian events of 1968, but it was in 1972, after three Turkish activists in Istanbul were hanged as political dissidents, that her work pivoted. She stopped making abstract paintings, and picked up her video camera. Real life had intervened. Real stories needed to be told.

Since then, Yalter has allowed projects to drift across the years, taking many forms, being added to and subtracted from as she wishes. The presentation of “Exile is a Hard Job” in Venice is dated 1977-2024. It also exists in a fly-posting project, where images of displaced families are pasted up in cities across the world, and written over in red with the work’s title translated into the local language. “In Valencia, the first time we did it in 2012, they’d torn them all down again by the time we’d had dinner,” she says. In Vitry-sur-Seine, on the other hand, it brought about a deep intellectual discussion.

The installation to be shown at Art Basel Paris, which dates from 1978, is also based on fact, but is a rarer piece. “It’s an atypical work and she was reluctant to show it,” says Suela Cennet, the founder of The Pill. “But it’s about privilege in times of war, and I managed to persuade her that this was the time.”

At the centre of the installation is an haute couture ivory silk Lanvin evening dress, made in 1928 and worn by someone that Yalter knew. It is surrounded by drawings and photographs that detail the dress and the context, and a video work (originally made in 1976) that investigates the garment’s silky interior, its folds and fluidity. The story is of a woman, living in Hitler’s Germany, who agreed to save a Jewish woman’s Pekinese dog, but not the woman herself.

Yalter clearly does not forget her own experiences easily. Though now she seems more focused on forging ahead. “She met an assistant in my gallery who’s working with AI,” says Salman Matinfar of Ab-Anbar. “I think she might get into that next.”

Art Basel Paris, October 18-20, artbasel.com, with Premiere artist talk: Nil Yalter on October 17; Venice Biennale, to November 11, labiennale.org

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Events abound in the art market these days, whether gallery weekends or shared exhibitions. The latest alliance comprises 31 galleries based in just one area of Paris — its 8th arrondissement — in a grouping known as the Association Matignon Saint-Honoré, after the crossroads at its centre. The zone stretches from gallery Esther Schipper by Place Vendôme to Artcurial at the Champs-Élysées — one of the four auction houses which are official partners of the collective. The group convenes in a night of show openings and related events, with the promise of food, drink and music, on October 14. 

The association came about through a WhatsApp group, explains its president, the gallerist Hélène Bailly. “We started out sharing neighbourhood tips and just trying to coincide our preview evenings,” she says. “Then we talked about making a special event. Basically, together we are stronger.”

The arrondissement has a long art-market history. Between the wars, it boasted galleries such as Wildenstein, Paul Rosenberg and Galerie Kahnweiler (their star artist Pablo Picasso also lived there). By the turn of this century though, its star had faded and galleries were more likely to open in the trendier Marais area. More recently though, the Matignon Saint-Honoré zone of the 8th arrondissement has been revived as a gallery district. Bailly, whose gallery has been on Faubourg Saint-Honoré since 2015, says the area “is more fashionable than it has ever been”. Overseas entrants since 2020 include White Cube, Mariane Ibrahim and Schipper, while this week France’s homegrown Galerie Mitterrand opens its second Paris space there, to coincide with the association’s event. 

Gallery members, who have paid €3,000 per year to join, including the shared cost of the launch event, are varied. Most specialise in Modern or contemporary art, including Mennour, which this week opens a show of work by the Algeria-born Dhewadi Hadjab. Mega galleries on the roster include Gagosian and Almine Rech — which open shows by Harold Ancart and James Turrell respectively in the 8th. There is also an 18th-century furniture specialist (Aveline), an Old Masters dealer (Galerie Florence De Voldère) and a couple of design specialists (Gokelaere & Robinson and Stéphanie Coutas).

Bailly and fellow gallerists Raphaël Durazzo and Alexis Lartigue, who are among the association’s board of directors, say it isn’t a case of competing with Paris’s existing gallery weekend in May, in which they all participate, or indeed with Art Basel, where many of the galleries also have a booth. “We really want to kick off the first day of a whole week of art in Paris,” Bailly says.

@matignonsainthonore

WHEN flying in economy class, the space to stretch out can be tight enough without hidden obstacles cutting into your legroom.

Housing boxes are often overlooked but can definitely be legroom killers and ruin your comfort, so make sure to know how to find them when booking your plane seats.

2

2

Advertisement

These boxes, typically hanging down under the seat in front of you, can limit your ability to stretch out fully, especially on long-haul flights.

The purpose of these boxes is to house electronic components or inflight entertainment systems, but their placement often interferes with passengers’ legroom.

Gregor Milne, of aircraft seating plan website Aerolopa, told The Telegraph: “On some long-haul aircraft, six out of 10 economy class seats are affected by these boxes.”

Thankfully, technological advancements are beginning to offer some relief.

“Thanks to new designs, these boxes are being replaced by smaller units that sit inside the seat pan and no longer get in the way of your feet,” the travel expert explained.

Some of the older, intrusive designs can still be found on British Airways’ Boeing 787 Dreamliners and Airbus A380s, where many economy passengers might find their foot space partially blocked.

But more recent aircraft like BA’s Boeing 777s, Airbus A350s, and refurbished Boeing 787-8s are equipped with the newer, space-saving units.

If you’re planning a long-haul flight, it might be worth checking the aircraft type beforehand and booking accordingly to avoid this annoying legroom killer.

It comes as new airline designs being rolled out include thinner plane seats so that more can fit into the cabin.

But this is bad news for hand luggage travellers too – as it means less space underneath.

According to USA Today, this is because it often reduces the amount of legroom.

And travellers, especially those flying with budget airlines such as Ryanair and easyJet, often rely on the floor space to fly with their bags.

We’ve recently raved about the Narwey bag that lets you fit a weekend’s worth of clothes into it, and fits under the seat in front of you.

But as seats get thinner (and more uncomfortable) – this may end up proving impossible.

Expert Christopher Elliott said: “When an airline announces a new cabin interior, it often moves to thinner seats, which allow it to add more capacity.

“Installing extra rows of seats usually means subtracting legroom.”

He said he found this out the hard way himself after being “unable to sit facing forward” on a recent flight as there was so little space between the seats.

Many travellers are resorting to underseat bags not only to save on cost, but also due to a lack of room in the overhead lockers.

Most airlines charge to check in a bag, which has resulted in the cabin lockers being full of hand-luggage suitcases instead.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland, has died, it was announced on Saturday.

He had been in North Macedonia, delivering a speech. He was 69.

A fiery orator and towering figure in Scottish politics, Salmond transformed the Scottish National party’s electoral appeal, propelling them into power at the devolved parliament in Holyrood in 2007, where the SNP still govern.

In 2011, the majority the SNP secured in that parliament built momentum towards independence from the UK, setting the scene for the referendum of 2014.

The campaign, which sparked a strong debate, ended in a win for the UK status quo and his resignation as first minister and party leader.

In 2018, he was accused of sexual misconduct but two years later a jury acquitted him of all 13 offence charges in a two-week trial.

The scandal destroyed his relationship with his successor, Nicola Sturgeon, and the SNP more broadly. Since 2021, he led the splinter pro-independence Alba Party.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

“This is our happiness, our joy!” exclaims Françoise Billarant, when I ask her if running a private museum with her husband Jean-Philippe is very demanding.

The couple are in their early eighties, and for almost half a century they have focused exclusively on collecting Minimalist, conceptual and contemporary art. In 2011 they opened Le Silo, a private art space in a former grain storage in a small town 45km north-west of Paris, to show their extensive collection.

The Billarants’ money comes from the family company Aplix, a maker of hook-and-loop fasteners with 880 global employees and a turnover of a little under €200mn. Today, their daughter Sandrine is chief executive, the third generation in the business.

Neither Françoise nor Jean-Philippe’s families were art collectors, they tell me as we drive back from Le Silo. The couple started buying art in the mid-1970s, traditional paintings at the Parisian saleroom Drouot, “just to put something on our walls”, says Jean-Philippe. Their initial enthusiasm for this older art soon waned. He explains: “I thought there must be contemporary artists who will be as significant one day as the Old Masters are now — with the advantage that we can get to know them.” A first foray into contemporary art, the purchase of two pretty pastoral scenes from a Right Bank gallery, ended with them taking them back to the dealer: “They were very pretty — too pretty,” Jean-Philippe laughs.

We didn’t buy with the idea of forming a collection, it was our way of supporting the artists, who became our friends

A turning point was a dinner with the curator Suzanne Pagé, at the time with the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and a later meeting with Serge Lemoine, former president of the Musée d’Orsay and a specialist in geometric abstraction. “Gradually, we moved towards conceptual and minimal art. We really taught ourselves. And we bought with our eyes, not our ears,” Françoise says. Jean-Philippe interjects: “Initially we didn’t buy with the idea of forming a collection, it was our way of supporting the artists. But we couldn’t leave the works in crates, so to give them life, we had to put them on display.”

For 30 years they were thinking of showing the collection, but when they had the “time and money” it only took a year to find Le Silo. About 100-120 works are displayed at a time in the building, and every two years the exhibition is changed; Jean-Philippe curates each show. “We have held seven to date, but we still haven’t been able to show everything,” says Françoise. Their Parisian home also shows Minimalist art, “but on a smaller scale”, she says.

Le Silo is open by appointment only; during Art Basel Paris the Billarants are expecting dozens of visitors, whom they take round themselves, communicating their enthusiasm for each piece. The sizeable collection, which numbers just under 1,000 works, is very much a mutual passion, and both know it intimately. There seems to be a great affinity between them, and they correct each other good-naturedly if the other hesitates over, say, a date.

“We know, or knew, almost all the artists we collect — they became friends,” says Jean-Philippe. The collection starts in the 1960s and comprises pieces by the great names of Minimalism — a copper floor piece by Carl Andre (“Mons Veneris”, 1975), two metal boxes by Donald Judd (1969), a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, a neon by Dan Flavin, as well as newer names — French artists François Morellet, Daniel Buren and the Scottish artist Charles Sandison, with wall pieces made of metal plaques. Also in the collection is “Proposition” (2002), a white-and-black work by the Brazilian couple Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, who are among the contenders for the Prix Marcel Duchamp (the French equivalent of the UK’s Turner Prize) this year. 

These and many more are displayed in the buff-coloured building, which dates from 1962 and was converted by the architect Dominique Perrault. A Lawrence Weiner text stands above the two doors — “Two Stones Tossed into the Wind (Causing Sparks)” (1988) — which open into a light-filled, airy space with the works carefully spaced out. Propped against one wall are two rusted metal squares by Richard Serra (“Basic Source”, 1987). “They weigh 1.7 tonnes . . . so they are never moved,” says Jean-Philippe.

Delicately, I ask what the future of Le Silo is. “We have a project which will enable it to remain after we have gone,” says Jean-Philippe. “I can’t tell you more, but there will be an announcement within the year.” I try to guess: a deal with the French state? Tantalisingly, they remain tight-lipped.

As our visit comes to an end, Françoise says, “Time is essential, to build a collection like this.” And we can only hope that it will last into the future, well beyond their own lifetimes.

Le Silo: route de Breancon, 95640 Marines. +331 4321 3816, by appointment only