For her 100th birthday on December 20, war veteran Anne Puckridge wants more than some cake and a telegram from the King. She wants the Government to change its policy on ‘frozen pensions’. Anne has been receiving the same £72.50-a-week pension she first received when she moved to Canada from the UK in 2001 to be close to her daughter, Diane.
Had she remained in the UK, her pension would have increased over the years to £169.50 a week, the old basic state pension for those retiring before 2016. As such, Anne has missed out on £50,000 of pension income.
Yesterday the frail 99-year-old arrived in London after journeying 4,400 miles from her home in Calgary accompanied by Diane. She is due to lobby MPs to make the case for almost half a million pensioners who are in a similar situation.
Anne is deeply disappointed that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has declined to meet her, and instead she will see pensions minister Emma Reynolds.
The pensioners she represents mostly live in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and do not benefit from the triple-lock guarantee by which the UK state pension goes up every year in line with whichever is highest of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 per cent.
Yet because of what Puckridge calls a ‘cruel pension lottery’, pensioners who have retired to countries that have reciprocal arrangements with the UK do benefit from the triple lock – and will receive the 4.1 per cent increase UK pensioners are due in April 2025, taking the full state pension for those who retired after 2016 to £230.25.
These countries include the European Union and the United States, just over the border from Canada.
‘It is scandalous,’ Puckridge tells the Daily Mail. ‘We have paid all our working lives in the UK and have made the full National Insurance contribution but because we live in certain countries we don’t get any increase. And we weren’t told that when we moved.’
War veteran Anne Puckridge, 99, who has travelled to London to lobby MPs
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) website states that pensions will only increase if you live in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, Switzerland, and countries that have social security agreements with the UK (but not Canada or New Zealand). ‘You will not get yearly increases if you live outside these countries,’ it states.
But when Puckridge moved, she said she was not told that her pension would remain at the level it was the day she left the UK. After serving in the RAF, the Navy and the Armed Forces in the Second World War, she settled in Aberdeen and taught shorthand and typing as well as computer science until she was 76, paying National Insurance all the while.
It was only once she had moved to Calgary that she realised that her pension was not increasing. Despite writing repeatedly to the DWP for information, it was not until 2012 that she was told the leaflet she had requested was no longer printed and that she should instead consult the internet.
‘We want something done now. With Christmas coming up, it is even more frustrating,’ says Puckridge. ‘I am not just fighting for myself. I am fighting for half a million frozen pensions around the world.’
Also making the journey to the UK from her home in Toronto is Edwina Melville-Gray, board chair of the End Frozen Pensions campaign in Canada. In October, she handed a letter to Downing Street signed by 150 UK and Canadian politicians including Steven MacKinnon, Canada’s labour minister, asking for the policy to be reconsidered.
Melville-Gray said that although 453,000 pensioners had their pensions frozen in 50 out of 56 Commonwealth countries, 650,000 pensioners living overseas do have their pensions uprated by the same degree as in the UK. ‘This is an injustice that needs to be corrected,’ she said. ‘One of our gentlemen is 104, and he has been getting £19 a week, which has been frozen for the last 40 years.’
Edwina Melville-Gray outside 10 Downing Street during her last pensions campaign
Pensions minister Emma Reynolds will meet with Anne Puckridge
DWP figures show that it would cost £940 million if any change in policy saw a full uprate to frozen pensions for 2024-25, putting them in line with UK pensions. However, Melville-Gray said that the campaign was now asking for a ‘very reasonable “uprating going forward” position of giving everyone the triple-lock increase from April 2025’. It would cost £55 million to apply the 4.1 per cent April increase to the frozen pensions, she said. The cost would be offset by the £2,616 per person, per year that the campaign estimates overseas pensioners save the Government through not using the NHS or key welfare services.
‘Canada has a social security agreement with the UK. However, in spite of repeated requests from the Canadian government, the UK refuses to do its part of the reciprocal agreement,’ says Melville-Gray. ‘Canada does not discriminate based on where its pensioners live and uprates fully those who live in the UK.’
A UK government spokesperson said, ‘We are deeply proud of our veterans and their families for the contribution they make to our country. Theirs is the ultimate public service, and their professionalism and bravery is rightly respected across the world. We understand people move abroad for many reasons, and we provide clear information on how this can impact their finances in retirement – with the policy on the uprating of the UK State Pension for recipients living overseas a longstanding one.’
In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights voted that it was not discriminatory to exclude pensioners living abroad from increases in their pensions. An appeal the following year was rejected.
Rather than launch a new legal challenge, End Frozen Pensions is increasing its pressure on the UK government – Puckridge’s other daughter, Gillian Mittins, 71, has garnered 127,000 signatures through her petition on change.org calling for a meeting with the prime minister. ‘My mother is not immortal. This is one final push to get justice,’ she said.
Gillian has also been affected by the policy. Having travelled the world and worked abroad during her sixties, she said that she had been forced to settle in Aberdeen rather than somewhere like Thailand because she couldn’t afford to have her pension frozen. ‘It’s ridiculous that I can go and live in the Philippines and get my pension uprated but not in Thailand or Vietnam,’ she said.
Meanwhile, her mother will get a glimpse of what it’s like to get her full state pension – during her week-long stay in the UK, she is entitled to the £169.50 weekly amount she would receive had she stayed in the UK. Will she be applying for it? ‘I most certainly will,’ she said.
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