WW2 veteran urges Starmer to end ‘brutal’ policy

A World War Two veteran has said Sir Keir Starmer has a “golden opportunity” to end what she describes as a “brutal” policy of freezing the pensions of some Britons who move overseas.

Anne Puckridge, who is days away from turning 100, is one of just over 453,000 British pensioners living abroad who do not get any annual rise in their state pension.

She has received £72.50 a week since she moved to Canada in 2001, at the age of 76, to be nearer her daughter.

Her state pension is now less than half the £169.50 paid to pensioners still living in the UK.

Ms Puckridge has lobbied successive governments without success and has now travelled to Westminster to raise the issue with the new government.

She will meet Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds later, after her request to meet Sir Keir was turned down due to “pressures on his diary”.

Previous governments have rejected calls to uprate frozen pensions, citing the cost as a barrier.

Ms Puckridge told the BBC frozen pensions affect every aspect of life.

“You’ve got to be careful about entertainment,” she said.

“You’ve got to remember you can’t be as kind to your grandchildren as you’d like to be.

“You feel you’ve lost all sense of dignity, the government has thrown you away, you know, out of sight out of mind.”

Ms Puckridge said when she informed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) she was moving to Canada “they never said a word about [my] pension being frozen”.

“The first I knew about it was when my first raise was due,” she said.

“I didn’t get it. So I wrote and asked about it, and I was told no… you will receive no more from the day you left the UK, no more increases in pension.”

She added: “It’s the injustice of it that is so unfair, the fact that we were never warned.”

Under an arrangement called the “triple lock”, the UK state pension goes up each year by either 2.5%, inflation or earnings growth – whichever is the highest figure.

Not all pensioners who move abroad have their pensions frozen.

The UK has agreements in place with EU countries and the United States, among others, to continue increasing pensions in line with the amount received by UK residents.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India are among the countries which do not have agreements.

Campaigners say that creates an injustice.

Patrick Edwards, who lives in Australia and is also part of the End Frozen Pensions campaign, said they had paid in like everyone else but were now being “treated differently merely because of their address”.

“If they lived in many other countries around the world they’d be getting the same as people in the UK but unfairly they’ve been selected as having had their pensions frozen,” he said.

There is diplomatic pressure to change the policy too.

The Canadian government is understood to have raised the issue with the new government already.

The Australian government made repeated representations to the last government and a spokesperson said it would continue to raise it at “appropriate opportunities”.

There appears to be little disagreement that politically it is difficult to justify the different treatment of overseas pensioners between countries.

The Institute for Economic Affairs think tank, which has often questioned the sustainability of the state pension, said: “The government should always be trying to save money, but this does not look like a particularly principled way of doing so.”

However, previous governments have argued that individual pensioners would be unlikely to benefit overall, as many also get financial support from governments, like Canada and Australia, which would be reduced as a result.

They have also cited the cost of fully restoring frozen pensions as a barrier.

In 2019, the Conservative government estimated it would cost £600m to fully restore pensions to the level they would have been if they had not been frozen.

The End Frozen Pensions Campaign says it only asking for pensions to increase from their current point.

It estimates the cost would be £55m in 2025/26.

A spokesperson for the DWP said: “We understand people move abroad for many reasons, and we provide clear information on how this can impact their finances in retirement – with the policy on the uprating of the UK state pension for recipients living overseas a longstanding one.”