The ‘End Frozen (UK) Pensions campaign’ – Westminster Hall Debate

The ‘End Frozen (UK) Pensions campaign’ – Westminster Hall Debate

Pensions: Expatriates

Tuesday 20th May 2025

To save you reading a long article, I have extracted some of the main points made by Members of Parliament in the debate on the “End Frozen UK Pensions campaign”, however I would recommend reading the full article at the url link at the bottom of the page.

The End Frozen Pensions Campaign aims to end the injustice for nearly half a million British pensioners who are excluded from annual payment upratings to their state pension because they live in the ‘wrong’ country. This means that their pension is ‘frozen’ at the level it was when they left the UK or first received their pension, falling in real value year-on-year. You can read more about it here: https://www.endfrozenpensions.org/about

Read on:

• Let me be clear about what the frozen pension policy entails: British citizens who retire in certain countries—for example, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the Commonwealth, in fact—are denied the annual inflationary increases to their state pension. A person retiring to the USA sees their pension uprated yearly, but if they cross the border into Canada, those increases stop. That can result in elderly pensioners receiving as little as £60 a week on average, despite the current basic state pension being £176.45 a week. As many as four in 10 frozen pensioners report struggling to afford most necessities such as food or medicine.
• British overseas pensioners are citizens who have lived, worked and grown up here. They remain citizens here; they are constituents, and, with the changes to overseas voting rules in 2024, many are now registered to vote in United Kingdom elections again. That means there are up to half a million voices who feel forgotten, neglected and increasingly betrayed by successive Governments.
• Geography should not be an excuse for a lack of morality. British overseas pensioners are making their voices heard; over 75% want their representative to commit to ending frozen pensions.
• the campaign reports that 86% of pensioners affected had no idea the policy even existed before they were impacted. That is too little, too late.
• the crux of today’s debate: the Government do not seem willing to engage in any meaningful way with the overseas electorate affected by the policy. I remind hon. Members that 158 parliamentarians from across the UK and Canada wrote to the Government last October calling for an end to the policy, and more than 140,000 people signed Anne’s petition to meet the Prime Minister in December.
• The most concerning aspect of the Government’s current line of response is the estimated cost of ending the policy altogether. Based on calculations made annually, the Government quote the figure of £950 million a year to uprate and backdate all pensions, but that is not the ask. The End Frozen Pensions campaign has made it abundantly clear that it is not calling for retrospective compensation. It is asking simply to receive the same annual increases going forward that are awarded to pensioners living here, and in the USA, France and a host of other countries. The cost of such a policy change is a mere £55 million a year—a fraction of the overall pensions budget…
• pensions are frozen in 50 out of the 56 Commonwealth nations
• Australia and Canada have made their frustrations clear. Canada has been formally requesting a resolution to the issue for more than 40 years. In October, 103 Canadian parliamentarians wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to address the issue. The Canadian and Australian Governments already provide full state pension increases to their citizens living in the UK. Meanwhile, they are left picking up the tab for British citizens residing in their countries.
• Putting an end to this blatant injustice is not only achievable but affordable—£55 million a year is not beyond our means. What is ultimately lacking is not money, but political will.
• the blight of frozen pensions affects nearly half a million British citizens living overseas, despite the fact that they paid national insurance contributions for much of their working lives.
• beginning to uprate the frozen pensions at a future date would cost only around £55 million a year.
•  the Government’s policy on freezing state pensions for British pensioners living overseas affects some half a million pensioners and is fundamentally unfair. I believe that it is morally unfair, because it penalises pensioners who have earned their state pension through decades of national insurance contributions. They have done the same as everybody else and have paid national insurance contributions and tax. They made a contribution to the society that they lived in. Today they are being penalised, and it is grossly unfair.
• People who have worked for their entire life in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are being denied the annual pension increases granted to UK residents simply because they chose to retire abroad, often to be closer to family
• . I think of Anne Puckridge, a 100-year-old world war two veteran who served in all three branches of our armed forces decoding messages during the war. After working in the UK until the age of 76, way beyond her pension years, and paying all her taxes and national insurance, she moved to Canada in 2001 to be near her daughter. Her daughter wanted her to be there, and she wanted to support her daughter. Her pension was frozen at £72.50 per week, rather than the £169.50 she would receive in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which has resulted in an estimated loss of £60,000 over 23 years.
• An especially important factor is that the affected pensioners are not adding to the pressures on public services such as the NHS on their retirement. When people get to 79 or 80, their impact on the national health service will be greater. They may have complex needs. Their age is agin them. Very clearly, their dependence on the NHS at that stage is much greater. If we take that out of the equation and they go to Canada, America or Australia, there is a real saving to the NHS. There will be no prescriptions either.
• It is time to end the frozen pension policy and provide full uprated pensions to British expat pensioners as soon as possible. I believe that that stance is supported by evidence from the Governments of Australia and Canada, with which we have a good working relationship.
• Pensions are a social contract. We pay our national insurance and our taxes into the system in the expectation and with the understanding that we will get something out of it when we become pensioners
• When we begin to pay taxes, we are not told that our pension entitlement will vary if we choose to live in one of these countries.
• That they are overwhelmingly Commonwealth countries seems even more bizarre. We have a special relationship with the Commonwealth: for example, 12% of Canadians claim Scottish heritage and 14% claim English heritage.
• People should be allowed to go and live with their family in the expectation that the Government will continue to support them in older age, not pull the rug out from under them. They have paid into the system just the same as the people who choose to live here
• The cost-benefit analysis shows that people overseas are not using the NHS here on a regular basis. They are not getting the free prescriptions in Scotland. They are not getting prescriptions down here. They are not getting a free TV licence—well, nobody is getting a free TV licence. They are not getting the benefits that an older pensioner living in the UK would expect. They are not taking those things out of the system, yet the UK is still unwilling to uprate their pensions.
• Historically, we have had a reciprocal arrangement with the United States but not with Canada. On one side of the Niagara Falls, people get their pension uprated; a couple of hundred yards across the river, people do not.
• , of blessed memory, led the campaign in Canada for many years. The irony is that, every time he came back for two weeks to make the case to whoever was in power, he would claim his two weeks’ uprated pension, because the moment he set foot on British soil, he was allowed to have it. Where is the sense in that?
• pensioners in the majority of Commonwealth countries do not receive uprated pensions, but pensioners in the European Union do, because we reached a reciprocal arrangement when we left the European Union. I am delighted that expat UK citizens living throughout the European Union are getting their pension uprated. That is absolutely right—they have paid their way—but I fail to see why people living in what we proudly used to call the British Commonwealth do not get their money.
• Why do they not get their money? The answer is quite simple: it comes down to the Treasury solicitors, who have historically been absolutely terrified that, if we give an inch, somebody will try to bring a class action to get a backdated pension, and of course those sums would be astronomical
• Nearly half a million UK pensioners living overseas are being penalised, not because they did not pay into the system but because of where they now live. They are our citizens—our veterans, carers, former teachers and nurses. They worked all their lives, paid into the national insurance system and are now denied the annual uprating of their state pension. Their pensions have been frozen, sometimes for decades, based purely on whether the UK happens to have a reciprocal agreement with their country of residence
• Nearly 13 million UK citizens receive the state pension, and around 1.2 million of them live outside the UK. Most of those people are entitled to state pension increases because they live in the European economic area or in the 15 other countries with which the UK has signed an agreement.
• The UK Government have stated that they uprate pensions only in those countries where there is a mutual agreement. Many of those agreements have not been updated or renegotiated for decades, and no new ones have been signed since 1981. Countries such as Australia and Canada have repeatedly requested new agreements, but the UK has declined. Frozen pensions are the norm in countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and parts of the Caribbean and Asia, despite significant British expatriate populations
• Colombia, Mongolia, Thailand, Uruguay, Brazil, Australia and Canada have all approached the Government in the past decade to ask for a reciprocal agreement, and each time the Government have refused.
• The two strongest criticisms of the existing overseas pension system are, first, that most pensioners do not realise that the frozen pension policy exists—perhaps before emigrating to live with their family, as we have heard—and, secondly, that not all British pensioners overseas are impacted by the policy because of reciprocal arrangements, as a result of which, there is a very unequal playing field.
• people could have moved to Turkey or the Philippines, and they would be receiving an unfrozen pension.
• In 2020, the cost of uprating frozen pensions to 2020 levels was estimated to be around £600 million, and the cost of uprating to today’s levels would be significantly higher. However, as we heard, the End Frozen Pensions campaign has suggested that people do not want the backdating and are happy to see their pension uprated from this point in time, which would cost £55 million
• the End Frozen Pensions campaign has clearly highlighted that overseas pensioners are in effect net savers for the UK—there is no burden on the welfare system or the NHS—meaning an aggregated saving of around £2,500 per person
• We have talked about the 442,000 people receiving a frozen state pension
• In 2025-26, the Government will spend over £174 billion on benefits for pensioners. That represents 5.8% of the UK’s GDP and includes £145 billion spent on the UK state pension, including for those living abroad.
• Of the 1.1 million state pension recipients overseas, 652,000 live in countries where pensions are uprated
• it means there are more than 400,000 pensioners living in countries where uprating is not paid. By volume, those are in the countries that have been mentioned most today: Australia, Canada and New Zealand
• Canada has made requests for a formal reciprocal arrangement, but the UK Government’s position—and that, again, of all parties—is that we are not in the business of new reciprocal arrangements with any countries. The only recent agreements have been the roll-over agreements with the EU and the EEA by the previous Conservative Government, but that was to maintain the existing social security arrangements, not to put in place any new reciprocal arrangements over that time.
• This is very much about the social contract, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) suggested. People have paid in, so they should expect to receive an equitable and fair playing field, whether they happen to have moved to somewhere in the European Union, the Philippines, Canada or Australia, or they are still living in this country.
• . I understood that we did not have reciprocal arrangements, and we were not paying uprating in places such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries, which I did not agree with, but I could just about understand because they are foreign nations. I was contacted yesterday by a representative of the Falkland Islands Government—the Falkland Islands is a British overseas territory, and is essentially Britain in all but name. There are 80 people there in this situation, many of whom have served in the armed forces. It seems bizarre that even for our overseas territories we do not uprate the pension.
• Finally, I go back to the requests I made. Will the Minister agree to meet with the campaigners so that we can go through the cost-benefit analysis and have a discussion about whether his figures or the campaigners’ figures are accurate? Will he at least commit to looking at some of the reciprocal pensions arrangements that we have with some of the countries that have been mentioned today, including Canada? Will he commit to doing everything in his power to make sure that first, people understand this policy and where they can and cannot get their pensions uprated? Even if he cannot commit today to sorting this out, will he commit to it still being on his radar going forward? If he has the opportunity —if finances allow—will he look to remove this policy so that every person, wherever they live, gets the pension they deserve?
• Question put and agreed to.
• Resolved,
• That this House has considered pensions for people living overseas.

Source: https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/debate/2025-05-20/commons/westminster-hall/pensions-expatriates