Some 453,000 state pensioners miss out on the yearly increase to payments in a huge ‘injustice’ that needs to be righted, a new campaign has said.
MPs have penned an early day motion, calling on the Government to act as hundreds of thousands get no increase because of where they live.
To get the increase each April in line with the triple lock, you have to live in the UK, a country in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, Switzerland or a country that has a social security agreement with the UK.
This means people who move to popular places to retire, such as Canada and Australia, see their payments frozen at whatever amount the state pension paid the year they moved there.
13 MPs have signed the motion, calling on Parliament to note “the so-called frozen pensions policy” as well as “the scale of the injustice which sees 453,000 British state pensioners impacted by the policy”.
Campaigners have been calling for years for the policy to change so all people get the triple lock increase, which delivered an 8.5% increase to payments this year.
The motion calls on the Government for all overseas state pensions to be indexed “equally” and urges Prime Minister Keir Starmer to meet with one frozen state pension, Anne Puckridge, a World War Two veteran who lives in Canada and gets just £72.50 a week.
If she was on the full basic state pension uprated to the current level, she would now get more than twice this, at £169.50 a week.
At the time of writing, the motion has been signed by a total of 13 MPs, including members from the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Social Democratic & Labour Party, and the Democratic Unionist Party.
One Labour MP has also pledged their support, Neil Duncan-Jordan, who is the first Labour MP to ever represent Poole, after winning the seat in the General Election this year.
This is the full list of MPs who have backed the motion:
- Christine Jardine
- Roz Savage
- Ian Sollom
- Jim Shannon
- Claire Hanna
- Ayoub Khan
- Neil Duncan-Jordan
- Andrew George
- Ian Roome
- Graham Leadbitter
- Gregory Campbell
- Angus MacDonald
- Charlotte Cane.
