For her 100th birthday on December 20, war veteran Anne Puckridge wants more than just a cake and a telegram from the King. He wants the Government to change its policy on “frozen pensions”. Anne has been receiving the same £72.50-a-week pension she first received when she moved to Canada from the UK in 2001 to be near her daughter Diane.
Had she remained in the UK, her pension would have increased over the years to £169.50 a week, the old basic state pension for those retiring before 2016. As such, Anne has lost £50,000 of income due to pensions.
Yesterday, the frail 99-year-old arrived in London after traveling 4,400 miles from her home in Calgary accompanied by Diane. It must pressure parliamentarians to defend almost half a million pensioners who find themselves in a similar situation.
Anne is deeply disappointed that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has refused to meet her and will instead meet Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds.
The pensioners she represents mostly live in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and do not benefit from the triple lock guarantee whereby the UK state pension rises each year in line with whichever is higher: inflation, growth of profits or 2.5 percent.
However, due to what Puckridge calls a “cruel pension lottery”, pensioners who have retired in countries that have reciprocal agreements with the UK benefit from the triple lock and will receive the 4.1 per cent increase that UK pensioners are due in April 2025, taking the full state pension for those who retired after 2016 to £230.25.
These countries include the European Union and the United States, just across the border from Canada.
‘It’s outrageous,’ Puckridge tells the Daily Mail. ‘We’ve paid all our working lives in the UK and made full National Insurance contributions, but because we live in certain countries we don’t get any rises. And they didn’t tell us that when we moved.
War veteran Anne Puckridge, 99, who traveled to London to lobby MPs.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) website states that pensions will only increase if you live in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, Switzerland and countries that have social security agreements with the UK (but not Canada or New Zealand). . “You will not receive annual increases if you live outside of these countries,” he says.
But when Puckridge moved, he said he was not told his pension would remain at the same level as the day he left the UK. After serving in the RAF, Navy and Armed Forces in the Second World War, he settled in Aberdeen and taught shorthand and typing as well as computing until he was 76, paying into National Insurance all the time.
It was only when he moved to Calgary that he realized his pension was not increasing. Despite repeatedly writing to the DWP for information, it was not until 2012 that she was told that the leaflet she had requested was no longer in print and that she should check the internet instead.
‘We want something to be done now. Now that Christmas is approaching, it’s even more frustrating,” says Puckridge. ‘I’m not just fighting for myself. I’m fighting for half a million frozen pensions around the world.
Also traveling to the UK from her home in Toronto is Edwina Melville-Gray, board chair of the End Frozen Pensions campaign in Canada. In October, he delivered a letter to Downing Street signed by 150 MPs from the UK and Canada, including Steven MacKinnon, Canada’s Labor Minister, calling for the policy to be reconsidered.
Melville-Gray said that while 453,000 pensioners had their pensions frozen in 50 of the 56 Commonwealth countries, 650,000 pensioners living abroad had their pensions increased to the same extent as in the UK. “This is an injustice that must be corrected,” he said. “One of our gentlemen is 104 years old and receives £19 a week, an amount that has been frozen for the last 40 years.”
Edwina Melville-Gray at 10 Downing Street during her latest pension campaign
Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds to meet Anne Puckridge
DWP figures show it would cost £940m if any policy change involved an overall increase in frozen pensions by 2024-25, bringing them in line with UK pensions. However, Melville-Gray said the campaign was now calling for a “very reasonable ‘future improvement’ position of giving everyone the triple raise from April 2025.” It would cost £55 million to apply April’s 4.1 per cent rise to frozen pensions, he said. The cost would be offset by the £2,616 per person per year the campaign estimates overseas pensioners save the government by not using the NHS and key social services.
“Canada has a social security agreement with the United Kingdom, however, despite repeated requests from the Canadian government, the United Kingdom refuses to honor its side of the reciprocal agreement,” Melville-Gray said. “Canada does not discriminate based on where its pensioners live and fully upskills those living in the UK.”
A UK Government spokesperson said: “We are deeply proud of our veterans and their families for the contribution they make to our country. Theirs is the quintessential public service, and their professionalism and bravery are rightly respected around the world. We understand that people move abroad for many reasons and we provide clear information on how this can affect their finances in retirement, as the UK’s policy of increasing the state pension for beneficiaries living abroad is one. long-standing policy.’
In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights voted that it was not discriminatory to exclude pensioners living abroad from pension increases. An appeal the following year was rejected.
Instead of launching a new legal challenge, End Frozen Pensions is increasing its pressure on the UK government: Puckridge’s other daughter, Gillian Mittins, 71, has gained 127,000 signatures through its change.org petition asking a meeting with the prime minister. ‘My mother is not immortal. This is a last push to get justice,” he said.
Gillian has also been affected by politics. Having traveled the world and worked abroad in her sixties, she said she had been forced to settle in Aberdeen rather than somewhere like Thailand because she could not afford to have her pension frozen. “It’s ridiculous that I can go live in the Philippines and get my pension increased, but not in Thailand or Vietnam,” he said.
Meanwhile, his mother will get a glimpse of what it’s like to receive her full state pension: during her week-long stay in the UK, she is entitled to the weekly amount of £169.50 that she would receive if she had stayed in the UK. Will you request it? “I certainly will,” he said.
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