In addition to lobbying Britain’s 650 Members of Parliament ahead of and after the recent election, the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP) has commissioned a major study into the financial aspects of pensioners choosing to live out their final years in a foreign country. It will unveil the findings next month, according to ICBP director of UK Parliamentary Affairs John Markham.
As previously reported, the pensioners claim that they are being treated unfairly by the UK because their pensions are frozen at the rate at which they first started drawing them, unlike those of UK pensioners still in Britain or living in certain other countries. For example, UK pensioners living in France and Germany have their pensions increased in line with the increases enjoyed by pensioners back home in Britain, while those living in New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong do not.
Markham, a Canadian pensioner, says his group is challenging the Department for Works & Pensions’ argument that it does not “up-rate” the pensions of retirees in certain countries, such as Canada, because these countries do not up-rate the pensions of their citizens living in Britain. The DWP’s argument is that these countries do not have a so-called ‘reciprocal agreement’ with the UK to do so.
Markham counters that the whole matter of reciprocal agreements “is dead,” adding: “several DWP ministers have said so, the last being James Purnell.”
Instead, Markham says, the UK government resists up-rating the pensions of half of its 1.1 million retired expats because it does not want to spend the money, even though, he contends, pensioners cost the government less when they live abroad than they do when they stay at home.
Other figures quoted on the www.pension-parity-uk.com website note that frozen pensions account for only 4% of the total, and that the cost of rectifying the anomaly “would be less than 1% of the annual National Insurance income”.
According to Markham, the cost of up-rating those expatriate pensions not currently topped up would be £540m a year, or around £1,000 per person.
Markham is former local Conservative party chairman in the old Northwest Surrey constituency, whose grandfather was Sir Arthur Basil Markham, who achieved some fame during World War I for his successful campaign against the recruitment of under-age boy soldiers by the British war office.
Markham moved to Canada in 1984 when he took a job there with the overseas operations of a UK-based electronics multi-national. He says he was never advised by DWP that his pension would be frozen until he began taking it.
