The week just past was Challenge Poverty Week, with various activities at Holyrood to highlight how poverty is a political choice.

With the week’s topics including Housing, Transport, Adequate Incomes, Food, and Communities and Volunteers, there was plenty to focus on.

On the Tuesday, First Minister John Swinney heard first-hand from folk from across Scotland, including the Highlands and Islands, with lived experience of life on low incomes. Discussions focused on barriers to work, cuts to public services, stigma and prejudice, and the need to strengthen our social security system.

The First Minister also led a debate in the chamber, which gave me the opportunity to highlight how the UK Labour government had already had a detrimental impact on poverty in this area.

Three months is barely enough time for the Labour government to do a detailed assessment of the impact of pulling money out of heating pensioners’ homes – perhaps giving an indication of why we do not yet have this. However, we can make an educated guess what this winter will mean for many pensioners, particularly in Orkney and the rest of the Highlands and Islands.

People of pension age are the group most likely to experience fuel poverty and this region has the highest level of fuel poverty in the UK. The decision to cut the universal winter fuel payment was taken not only against the best interests of the Highlands and Islands, but without sparing a thought for us.

If the Labour Government knew that it was sentencing constituents in Orkney and the rest of the region to a harsh winter without even as much support as they got from the Tories, it would surely have thought twice, assessed the potential impacts, engaged with the Scottish Government and with older people’s organisations, and then taken the correct decision to keep people warm and alive.

Sadly, however generous we want to be about Labour’s ignorance of what the decision meant when it was first announced, there is now no chance that Keir Starmer does not know what he has done. He has experts, members of the public, and people of all political parties – including his own – telling him every day.

I cannot see how Labour MSPs at Holyrood can defend a UK Government that is cutting welfare budgets, ramping up austerity and removing fiscal opportunities from the Scottish Government, all the while claiming that the reason that the people from whom it has taken money this winter are going cold is the SNP.

The real fact is that the SNP is the reason that £3 billion is being spent this year to directly support vulnerable households. The SNP is the reason that the families of more than 30,000 children last year got a child heating payment. The SNP is the reason that disabled people can now access social security in this country through a system that treats them with dignity, fairness and respect.

UK Labour’s decisions since July are not good enough. Leaving pensioners cold, and trampling over devolution, is not good enough. UK Labour must right these wrongs.

This is a regular column by SNP MSP Emma Roddick. All Highlands and Islands MSPs have been offered the same space in The Orkney News to share their views.