The MPs are Sir Roger Gale and Sir Peter Bottomley, both of whom are Conservative backbenchers and of pension age themeselves (70 and 69 respectively).
The MPs have agreed to table an amendment to pension legislation that is currently making its way through Parliament, which would remove a specific clause – "Clause 20" – from it. According to the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP), one of the main groups campaigning to "unfreeze" the state pensions of expats, this clause "provides for the continuity of the anomalistic freezing of certain recipients of [the British state pension], dependent on where they reside".
The pension bill had its second reading debate on 17 June 2013, and sources close to the frozen pension issue say that it is not known when it will have its third reading and progress to a vote. It is thought that it could be as soon as mid-October, once the party conference season is over.
Shelia Telford, the Canada-based chairperson of the ICBP, said it was difficult to say whether the latest effort had a good chance of success, but that her organisation was hopeful that the public support of MPs Gale and Bottomley would raise awareness of the issue, particularly among other members of Parliament, "many" of whom are still unaware of it.
"We think it is essential that all members of Parliament understand how important it is for Britain to do the right thing by its expat pensioners," Telford added.
John Markham, a pensioner who also lives in Canada and who is director of UK Parliamentary Affairs for the ICBP, said the group plans a major publilc-awareness-building campaign next month, and is also working to educate MPs on the issue, "and asking them to add their names to the amendment" to the pensions bill.
Long battle
The expat pensioners have been fighting to get their state pensions "uprated" annually for decades. (The first recorded failure of expat pensioners to receive the same increase in their pension as those resident in the UK took place in 1946, when those back in Blighty saw their weekly amount increase to £1.30 from 50p, but those abroad did not, according to the ICBP.)
More than half a million British pensioners worldwide are said to be affected by the frozen pension issue, which results from a historic anomaly whereby those pensioners who live in certain foreign countries – but not others – have their pensions frozen at the rate that they were at when they first moved abroad (or when they first started to receive them, if they were already living overseas).
Some of the most popular overseas retirement destinations for British pensioners are on the frozen-pension list, including New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The US, however, is not on the list, which is understood to be particularly irksome to some Canadian expats, who must cope with roughly similar costs of living and inflation, yet receive less than their counterparts south of the border, who are not part of the British Commonwealth.
Officials with the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions and politicians who oppose uprating the 550,000 expat pensions, mostly in Commonwealth countries, have argued that it is fair to favour 630,000 pensioners who live in countries with which the UK has reciprocal agreements, notwithstanding that it discriminates against its nationals retired in countries with whom it refuses to negotiate such bilateral agreements based on the excuse of the cost of doing so.
Britain currently has such arrangements with its 28 fellow EU countries as well as with the US, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey.
As reported, the ICBP last month called for the UK to be suspended from the Commonwealth until it gave the expat pensioners the inflation-linked rises to their pensions that they have not been receiving. By not uprating their pensions at the same rate as it does those pensioners who still live in the UK, the pensioners’ group argued, Britain was effectively defaulting on the Commonwealth Equality Charter, which was signed by the Queen in March, and which calls for equality and an end to discrimination.
In 2010, after having exhausted their options in the UK legal system, the pensioners were hopeful that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg would find in their favour, but it didn’t.
