Government thaws on frozen expat pensions

The Westminster government has established a working group to examine the possibility of unfreezing state pensions for British expatriates.
The move comes just nine months after an eight year long court battle culminated in the rejection in March this year of an appeal to the European Court of Justice that the practice was discriminatory.
British pensioners who leave the United Kingdom for one of 120 countries, including most of the Commonwealth such as South Africa, Australia and Canada, have their state pension entitlement restricted to the level at which it stood when they left.
This is unlike their counterparts resident in Britain, the EU and several other lands, who receive annual inflation-linked increases.
A working group consisting of amongst others, officials from HM Treasury and members of the pressure group the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP), will now investigate the problem, which currently affects over half a million pensioners.
An early day motion calling on the government to end the freezing of state pensions for expats, sponsored by Work and Pensions Committee chair Dame Anne Begg, has attracted over one hundred MPs' signatures.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has repeatedly said the uprating of expats' pensions would be too expensive for the state, as it would cost the taxpayer an extra £620 million a year to pay uprated pensions in countries where they are currently frozen, and another £5.5 billion to backdate the payments.
Age Scotland spokesman Lindsay Scott said: "We welcome this apparent change of heart by Westminster and hope it means that the government is starting to take the issue of frozen pensions seriously."
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