LONDON (CU)_In late October, the Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom confirmed that more than 10 million state pensioners will receive a pay rise of 3.1 per cent by next Spring, a move which is aimed at protecting them from soaring cost of living. Accordingly, the full basic state pension is expected to go up by £221 to £7,376.20 a year to in April 2022.
However, the benefit will not be enjoyed by almost half a million Britons who have retired or immigrated to other countries, who have continued to lose out as a result of the UK’s “frozen pensions” policy. While the increase in spring will raise the UK basic state pension to £141.85 a week, pensioners living overseas are receiving as little as £22 a week, a value which never goes up.
Moreover, many of them are facing even bigger increases in cost of living in comparison to their counterparts in the UK. For example, in September this year, the annual inflation rate of South Africa reached a whopping 5 per cent, and in Canada it climbed to an 18-year high of 4.4 per cent. Meanwhile, in the UK this figure was at 3.1 per cent a couple of months ago.
Recent figures have revealed that the basic state of pensions of around 492,000 older Britons living overseas does not increase every year, as they are “frozen” at the level they were on the day they became entitled to the payment if they were already living abroad, or the date they moved away while retired.
In certain situations, the UK state pension is uprated annually, if there is a legal requirement to do so. Therefore, in countries like the US and Israel, and member states of the EU, the state pension increases in line with inflation. However, this is not the case in more than 100 countries worldwide, including some of the Commonwealth nations such as Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and even in British overseas territories such as the Falkland Islands.
This week, the End Frozen Pensions called on 10 Downing Street to take necessary action to end this “morally bankrupt” policy. According to a survey conducted by the campaign between August and September this year, half of the 900 participants said they received a state pension of £65 a week or less. A vast majority of them are living in Commonwealth nations, which have close ties with the UK.
“My husband also has a frozen pension of £66 a week. He has Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and heart disease. Our medical aid contributions alone cost £60 a week,” 78-year-old Valerie Hepplestone, who lives in South Africa with her husband, Ian, said. “We paid national insurance contributions even after leaving the UK, thinking that our pension would be secure. We did not realise that it would be frozen.”
