Frozen pension petition hits 220,000 signatures

A petition against frozen pensions launched by the daughter of a 93-year old British expat living in Canada has been signed by 220,000 protestors.

The petition called for pensions justice to relieve the hardship endured by those Britons who’d retired to countries with which the UK has no formal Social Security agreement. Of the one million and more UK expatriates retiring overseas, some 50 per cent have no entitlement to yearly cost of living upgrades, no matter how long they’ve been living overseas. The majority of EU member states, Barbados, the Philippines and the USA have agreements with the UK, but many other states, including some which used to be part of the British Commonwealth, do not.

Britons retiring to New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa as well as most of Asia and Africa will see their pensions frozen from the day they leave the UK for the last time. In Canada, 144,000 pensioners are affected, and are also losing out on the exchange rate since the pound slumped after the Brexit referendum result. The 93-year old WW2 veteran Anne Puckeridge, whose daughter started the online petition, flew to London last week to hand the 220,000-signature petition in to Downing Street, in order to highlight the plight of Brits who’d paid in all their working lives and are now left without enough to get by.

Puckeridge chose Canada as her daughter and family were already living there, emigrating 17 years ago when her state pension payment was set at £72.50 a week, an amount she is still receiving. Over the intervening years, she’d lost some £22,000 in payments as compared with a British pensioner whose weekly payment has been regularly updated. According to the International Consortium of British Pensioners, some expat retirees are attempting to survive on £30 a week, and others are even receiving less than when they first emigrated. A total of 120 countries do not have agreements with the UK, and 18 are home to 1,000 or more UK retirees with frozen pensions.