UK government should focus on frozen pensions scandal not winter fuel payment

UK retirees who have or are planning to emigrate to countries where their state pension will be frozen are angry at the government’s focus on the rights and wrongs of expat winter fuel payment whilst they struggle to get by.

The less than popular millionaire Minister for Work and Pensions, Ian Duncan-Smith, hit the headlines again earlier this week when he whined about the European Court of Justice’s decision extending the right to claim winter fuel payments to foreigners who had worked in the UK and paid NI contributions. Many believe the minister was simply diverting attention from the ongoing disgrace of frozen pensions.

Some who retired abroad to countries without a reciprocal agreement decades ago are still alive, but living on the local equivalent of as little as £10 per week. If, say protestors, you can call that living, notwithstanding the contributions towards their survival made by the governments of their host countries.

The organisations and MPs fighting the injustice believe that common sense will prevail eventually, but Duncan-Smith’s skewed financial justification for continuing the freeze is sticking in the craws of at least 560,000 overseas pensioners and dissuading many thousands more from leaving the UK for a better quality of life elsewhere. The fact is that government money saved via the NHS and supplementary benefit payments not available to overseas pensioners is millions more than the cost of upgrading every UK frozen pension.

As regards the winter fuel payment, any government minister who decides that a pensioner living through Cornwall’s mild winters should receive it whilst another living in an Alpine snowdrift shouldn’t is clearly not fit for the job. Perhaps if the majority of expat pensioners still entitled to the vote would use it, a different government might decide on a fair deal for expat pensioners everywhere.