The International Consortium of British Pensioners ICBP has suggested to the UK Government that it abolish Britains frozen pensions policy in annual stages, initially by defrosting the pensions of expats who are 85 or older.
via Plea for frozen pensions to be phased out – Telegraph.
Is there an expat pensioner who is getting a worse deal than 100-year-old Annie Carr? Mrs Carr, who was born in Sunderland and emigrated to Australia in 1970 to join her only daughter, receives a UK basic state pension that is frozen at just £6.12 a week. Yet if she had stayed in the UK, or emigrated to a country such as Spain or the US, she would be getting up to £107.45 a week. Instead, she is out of pocket by more than £5,000 a year.
Campaigners say that cases such as this demonstrate why the UK government’s “frozen pensions” policy – highlighted in Guardian Money last Saturday – is discriminatory and unfair, and results in financial hardship for British citizens around the world.
via The 100-year-old woman whose state pension is frozen at just £6 a week | Money | The Guardian.
The International Consortium’s [ICBP] latest activities
From March 13th, Tony Bockman Hon Chairman of ICBP had, in lieu of John Markham who had to stay home back in Ottawa to help his indisposed wife, spent about 3 weeks in the UK spreading our message around many similar organisations to ours. These are organisations with which we have developed a linkage to assist in spreading our message around the UK emphasising the unfairness of the UK pension policy in freezing our pensions. This part of our on-going strategy is being progressed to achieve stronger support in the UK to sign the petition http://bit.ly/BritPensions which we hope all our email members have now signed. A further petition has been set-up by a South Africa based pensioner with whom I keep in regular touch. He has requested our help in publicising this petition which can be accessed at:-
www.avaaz.org/en/petition/I_want_to_see_pension_parity_for_all_expat_British_pensioners_regardless_of_where_they_live//?sbc (Just click on this link)
Some of you have previously raised the issue of partners not being able to sign the initial petition from the same email address, but I believe this issue has now been resolved. For more details please refer to the bottom of the Canadian’s website www.britishpensions.com home page. It works; I’ve just signed in my wife. Moreover this website contains the front page of the Canadians’ latest newsletter Justice 2 2012, which has the opening days of a diary of events that Tony Bockman undertook. I am hoping soon all 4 pages of this diary will be available to read so that all of his diary can be read from Australia, for it would seem pointless my repeating all that Tony has reported. Moreover it is important that all our members are aware of the considerable effort Tony expended during that trip and the many things achieved to improve our position in our ongoing campaign. Perhaps one of Tony’s key achievements was the finalisation of a new Consortium website www.pensionjustice.org which we recommend you visit regularly, for it is expected to be updated on an ongoing basis.
Unfortunately Tony was unable to meet our supportive senior Cabinet Minister to ascertain why the latest UK budget did not contain some changes to the pension rules so that at least some of our older members would have had their pensions indexed, as we had hoped would happen. However John Markham, during a very short private visit to London in late April, did finally manage a meeting with the said Senior Cabinet Minister and discovered the door to negotiations remains open, which is encouraging.
BPiA Activities
BPiA’s work in Australia during April continued to focus on 2 major fronts;-
1 Recruiting more members continues apace to help boost funds to send to Canada and the UK to pay for the ICBP activities. We still have many phone calls and emails requesting of us details about how to boost one’s UK pension entitlement and whether one is entitled and how to apply for the UK pension. Many of these requests come from people who have been recommended to contact us by existing members. This is very much appreciated and encouraging, for our satisfied membership is obviously making its mark. In April our membership rose by almost a further 100 and we are rapidly approaching 11,000 members. We did erect a stall at the Scottish event “Brigadoon at Bundanoon” in the NSW Southern Highlands and with the thankful help of members Ken Jeffrey and Marian Day, managed to recruit a further 44 new members there.
2 Publicity: Meanwhile BPiA continues to seek out and find ways to spread our message.
We are still hoping those of you represented by Labor Federal MPs have organised a meeting with your local MP, as suggested in both our January and February reports, to discuss and brief these MPs on the frozen pension issue, and to encourage them to take this issue to Labor’s regular Canberra Caucus meetings. Eventually we expect to bring the frozen pension issue to the attention of Caucus, an important Labor facility, so that our Aussie Government decides to apply more effective action on their behalf and ours. I know some of your have made an effort in this regard and I have been to see one MP in an adjacent constituency, Daryl Melham [Banks], and I received a most supportive reception.
Thank you;-
Jim Tilley,
Hon Chairman; Woronora Heights, NSW 6th May 2012
BPiA, a founder member of ICBP, is a non-profit volunteer association of expatriate British Pensioners intent on forcing the UK Government to index the UK pensions for all expats living abroad. See www.bpia.org.au
Postal address – PO Box 474, Edgecliff, NSW 2027; Phone 1300 308 353; Email bpia@people.net.au
If you have chosen to spend the autumn of your life in a country other than the land of your birth then beware of the British government’s treatment of you should you decide to come to Australia. Settle in America or Europe and you carry on receiving your hard earned UK state pension, index linked each year. Not so in Australia, the moment you arrive in this wonderful country our British government penalises us for our choice and stops the annually index linked review.Try talking to the UK pension department and all you are told is that there is no agreement with Australia. Speak to the Australian authorities and all they say is to contact the British pension department!Our new foreign minister has promised to take this up with the UK government as a matter of urgency, mindful of the fact that previous attempts by Australian ministers to get the UK government to agree, have failed.The minister has stated that the Australian government is being forced to support some UK pensioners who have settled here because they cannot live within the diminishing UK pension.Retired UK expats have spent their working lives donating to their final index linked state pension only to find that it starts to diminish the minute they set foot in Australia. The complete unfairness of the UK government treating one country differently to another is further exacerbated by the fact that the old age health demands of the UK ex-pats resident in Australia fall on the Australian Government. Doctors’ bills, blood tests, x-rays, specialists’ advice, hospitalisation and drugs should be the burden of the British government but they have handed this responsibility to Australia.The time has come to take action and support the Australian Foreign Minister in his attempt to force the UK government into an agreement that is long overdue. All UK retired ex pats in Australia should now contact the UK Prime Minister, demanding immediate index liking of pensions dated back to the time they entered Australia. The Downing Street website gives the contact addresses but advises against sending an email because it probably will not get an answer!!Send your protest via the following routes but let us club together to bring pressure to bear as quickly as possible.The Prime Minister. 10 Downing Street. London. SW1QA 2AA
via Pensioners Suffering in Australia : British Expat Community.
Some people who retire abroad can bask in the sun as their pension grows with UK inflation, while others are frozen out to the tune of £20,0
If you harbour dreams of retiring somewhere hot, or you are keen to move abroad to join your grown-up son or daughter, make sure you don’t end up a loser in the expat pension lottery.
Many Brits thinking about retiring abroad probably don’t realise that where you choose to retire will have a huge impact on how much money you have to live on in your old age.
If you decide to move to Australia, Canada, South Africa or one of 170 other countries, your basic state pension won’t increase annually, as happens in the UK. It will be permanently frozen at the date you retire or when you arrived in that country, and it will never increase, no matter how rich or poor you are, or how much you’ve paid in national insurance contributions.
However, if you move to an EU country, the US, or one of a seemingly random list of other countries including Israel and the Philippines, your state pension will increase in line with inflation.
There are around 555,000 “frozen” pensioners around the world, almost half of whom live in Australia. Some of the very oldest, who qualified for their state pensions in the 1970s, have had their payouts frozen at as little as £6 a week. Yet they would be getting up to £107.45 a week if they were living in Florida or on the Costa del Sol.
The frozen pensioners have long argued that these rules, imposed by the UK government, are discriminatory and unfair, and result in financial hardship for British citizens around the world. These rules are also preventing some older Brits from moving abroad to join children and grandchildren living in countries such as Canada because they are worried about becoming a financial burden to their family as the value of their UK pension dwindles.
Ten years ago this month the pensioners launched an ultimately fruitless legal challenge, which kicked off in the high court and went all the way to the European court of human rights. Ministers concede the rules are “illogical”, but argue it would be too expensive to uprate pensions for everyone. They say the priority should be targeting money at the poorest pensioners living at home.
But the organisations representing the frozen pensioners refuse to give up, and have embarked on a multi-pronged campaign aimed at overturning this “immoral” policy.
Last week the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP), which represents expat campaigning groups in Australia and Canada, launched its new Pension Justice website, aimed at highlighting their plight.
And, after exhausting the legal process, they have decided to appeal to the Queen in her diamond jubilee year. In a letter sent to her last month, 73-year-old Jim Tilley, who moved to Australia in 1971 and is honorary chairman of the British Pensions in Australia group, said: “We pray that … you will see reason to request your government to be less intransigent about this issue.”
The organisations have some supporters in high places. Australia’s foreign minister, Bob Carr, recently met the UK’s foreign secretary William Hague in London, and called on the British government to uprate the pensions of Britons living in Australia. “Australia’s got a very strong case here … I’m strongly opposed to what they’re doing,” Carr said earlier this month.
Meanwhile, an early day motion calling on the government to review the regulations and “treat all British pensioners with the dignity and fairness they deserve” has been signed by 102 MPs including former Lib Dem leaders Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy. And an e-petitionon the Directgov portal has 19,000 signatures.
So just how much does this policy cost people? Freezing pensioners’ entitlements means they can lose out on up to £24,000 of income over 20 years of retirement, according to a report (pdf) published in December by the Runnymede Trust, a leading race equality thinktank. One British couple featured on Pension Justice, Geoff and Doris Dancer, who live in Ottawa, Canada, reckon that between them they have been denied around £40,000 of pension over the past 20 years. On reaching 65 in 1986, Geoff Dancer, who served in the RAF from 1939 to 1948, qualified for a 100% state pension of £38.30 a week – the same amount he receives today.
While some people argue there is no reason why UK taxpayers should have to fund people who live abroad and are now contributing nothing to the British economy, it would be hard to argue there is any logic to the system. British pensioners in Jamaica and Barbados, for example, get the increases, but those in Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia and Antigua don’t. Similarly, Mauritius is uprated, while its Indian Ocean neighbour the Seychelles isn’t. Even the Falkland Islands don’t get special treatment. The 70-odd British pensioners living there have had their pensions frozen – but, oddly, it’s a different story for their counterparts in Bermuda, thousands of miles to the north, who enjoy uprated payouts.
And this isn’t just an issue for the traditionally white British expats moving to the “old Commonwealth” countries, points out 79-year-old John Markham, the ICBP’s director of UK parliamentary affairs, who moved to Canada in 1984, and says he has lost 50% of his pension entitlement because of the policy. It also affects many black and Asian people who came to Britain during the 50s, 60s and 70s, have lived and worked here for decades, paying their taxes and NI contributions, and are now looking to retire to their country of birth in the Caribbean, Africa or south Asia.
Phil Mawhinney, author of the Runnymede Trust report, says: “It is clearly unfair that the people who were encouraged to rebuild the UK after the second world war by [for example] working for the NHS should risk losing their entitlements if they return to the Caribbean or elsewhere.”
Those people who quit Britain for a retirement overseas are arguably saving UK taxpayers money because they are not using services such as the NHS. The ICBP pointed to a March 2011 study by Oxford Economics which claimed that each pensioner who moves abroad saves the UK taxpayer about £7,700 a year in healthcare, pension and age-related costs.
Markham, whose grandfather served as Liberal MP for Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, says: “We are fighting this on the basis that it’s unfair, it’s not just, and it’s not the British way of doing things. A number of these pensioners fought for this country in the last war.”
British pensioners who live in any of the 30 countries that make up the European Economic Area – or Switzerland – get annual increases to their basic state pension.
These so-called “upratings” are also paid to pensioners living in 16 countries or territories with which the UK has a reciprocal social security agreement requiring increases to be paid: Barbados, Bermuda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Israel, Jamaica, Jersey, Mauritius, Montenegro, the Philippines, Serbia, Turkey, the US and Macedonia. No other countries get the increases.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office says: “Our position on this issue has been endorsed by the European court of human rights. We do not apply living increases to the pensions of those living in [countries such as] Australia. Our policy in this area has remained the same since 1955, and we believe it is the fairest system possible for those who live and pay tax in the UK.”
In 1955 UK state pensions became payable worldwide. But the agreements signed with countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand during the 1950s didn’t include upratings.
The International Consortium of British Pensioners says: “The UK government could choose to unfreeze pensions unilaterally at any time through a simple change in policy.”
Retiring overseas may seem like a warm and relaxing way to spend your golden years, but if you want to retire to any one of 120 destinations, including Canada, the Caribbean and Australia, you will pay a massive and utterly unfair price – you will have your state pension frozen, and it will gradually become worth less and less as you see inflation destroy it.So why is this happening, and how can it be fair?
via Expat pensioners face frozen income.
But for nearly 556,000 UK pensioners outside Europe, the dream is turning increasingly cold as their ‘frozen’ state pensions dwindle in value every year.While pensioners emigrating to Europe, the USA and over 40 other countries have their state pensions indexed annually, as in the UK, 4.4% of pensioners in mainly Commonwealth countries have their pensions ‘frozen’ in time, meaning they remain at exactly the same level as when their recipients first moved abroad. Yet another example of what looks like deliberate discrimination against the Commonwealth, by the way.
For these 556,000 British pensioners, retired life is becoming increasingly difficult with some forced to live on as little as £33 per week. This is not only deeply unfair — these pensioners have been contributing via National Insurance contributions all their lives, regardless of which sunnier clime they move to — but strangely illogical.
via It’s frosty out there: the Plight of Expat Pensioners | Roger Helmer MEP.
The statistics were revealed by Lord Freud, the minister for welfare reform, after the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Jones of Cheltenham applied for a written answer identifying “how many people living outside the United Kingdom received non-uprated United Kingdom state pensions in the most recent period for which data is available, broken down by country and territory”.They show that there are now well over half a million 555,650 British retirees abroad whose pensions are not inflation-proofed, as well as identifying which locations are home to the most people affected.
via Over half a million expats denied full pension – Telegraph.
The International Consortium’s [ICBP] current and future activities
During February John Markham and Tony Bockman have completed ICBP’s strategies for 2012 and had them agreed to by the key Consortium members. These strategies are designed to achieve our primary mission being the indexation of all UK State pensions, irrespective of where in the world any one who has worked in the UK now lives. Meanwhile John Markham has to stay back in Ottawa while his wife recovers from her indisposition, so Tony Bockman, standing in for John, set off for The UK on Monday March 12. Included among his main activities in London will be the completion of the development of the new ICBP website. This website, it is hoped, will help to attract more visits from people in the UK and their signing of the petition at http://bit.ly/BritPensions . This website task is being completed utilising the specialist expertise from Champollion, our ICBP funded London based public relations team.
Champollion has recently made us aware of a website in the UK for retirees, which features matters relating to finances when migrating, it is called Gransnet and can be reached via www.gransnet.com. Scroll down a little then click on Retiring Abroad and the ICBP gets a mention. I will see if BPiA can be featured in this section, for those wishing to migrate to Australia; but critically, it is there so that visitors to Gransnet are encouraged to sign the ICBP petition.
Tony is planning to meet with some of our major supporters in The House of Lords, including Baroness Benjamin from Trinidad. This meeting is with a view to linking up with contacts from Trinidad we made at CHOGM, for we believe that pensioners from the Caribbean could present a weak point in the UK Government’s denial of indexed pensions to some 4% of us expats retired abroad. He will also arrange to meet, if possible, a member of BPiA who has close links with the Caribbean islands and many Caribbean people who are still retired and living in the UK. He’s trying too to organise meetings with journalists from some of the main newspapers in London as well as several pensioners’ organisations to whom he is hoping to make presentations.
While Tony is in the UK the British budget will be declared in Parliament. The date for that event is March 21st, so we are keeping “everything crossed” in the hope the British Government will show its eventual intentions towards our pensions by indexing some pensions for say the older expat pensioners, maybe the over 80s or over 85’s. If this eventuates it will represent a political wedge on which we will then have to maintain pressure on the British Government eventually to ensure that all of us have indexed pensions. The chances of this happening were discussed in Justice, Issue 1 2012, the newsletter from the Canadian Association [CABP]. A few days ago we were given permission by CABP to distribute this excellent newsletter to all of our email members. We hope you opened the attachment and read the whole of this useful newsletter, which demonstrates the partnership we have with the Canadians, for there are some references to BPiA and myself in that newsletter. If you have not yet opened this useful information please click on;-
http://britishpensions.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Justice-1-2012.pdf
Subsequent to our distributing the Justice newsletter some BPiA members have contacted us asking why BPiA are not as active as the Canadians seem to be. Our response is that both the Canadians’ association CABP and BPiA are jointly assisting the International Consortium of Pensioners [ICBP] and working in tandem to fund the activities of Tony Bockman and John Markham, who just happen to live in Canada and as it happens are also on the Canadian CABP Board. But many of your subs and donations we collect here in Australia are sent to Canada to help fund the work of these 2 ICBP chaps, Tony and John, as well as for the work of Champollion. So we are all working on this campaign as a team. Moreover I will be in England on holiday, at my own expense, for a few days in May 2012 and may, if necessary, make some visits to various people there to help promote our cause too.
BPiA Activities
BPiA’s work in Australia during February has been focussed on 2 major fronts;-
UK. She acknowledged my message and has passed on details of our pension situation to
the ABC’s 7 30 report. I intend to follow up both those invitations in the next few days to see
if we can achieve more publicity in that ABC national programme. The outcome of the UK
budget could be a good time to have our cause publicised in such a programme.
www.abc.net/radionational/programs/lifematters/british-pensions/3718562 .
You will also need to download the audio segment too.
As many seniors and local papers we can interest are always bring requested by us with our
endeavours to get our point of view published and therefore read.
Tony Bockman, ICBP Chairman, is proposing to send a letter to The Queen, as it is the Diamond
Jubilee year. We will follow his example and I will soon develop a model letter which will be sent
to all our email members asking them to follow suit, but written in their own words please. Timing
is critical, so please do not send your letter to The Queen’s until you are asked to by way of my
email.
We are hoping those of you with Labor Federal MPs have organised a meeting with your local
MP, as suggested in our January report, to discuss the frozen pension issue, so that we can
encourage them to take this issue to Labor’s regular Caucus meetings in Canberra. Eventually we
expect to bring the frozen pension issue to the attention of that important Labor facility, so that our
Aussie Government decides to apply more effective action on their behalf and ours.
Thank you;-
Jim Tilley,
Hon Chairman; Woronora Heights, NSW 10th March 2012
BPiA, a founder member of ICBP, is a non-profit volunteer association of expatriate British Pensioners intent on forcing the UK Government to index the UK pensions for all expats living abroad. See www.bpia.org.au
Postal address – PO Box 474, Edgecliff, NSW 2027; Phone 1300 308 353; Email bpia@people.net.au