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When the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury in 1948, it brought 802 passengers from the Caribbean. Any who returned to Jamaica after a life spent working in England and paying national insurance rightly received a UK state pension, and it went up every year. It still does for the estimated 13,000 British retirees in Jamaica. But if those from the Windrush generation returned to Antigua or St Lucia, they faced a special cruelty: their UK state pension was frozen at the level on the day they left Britain. So if they retired in the mid-1990s and are still alive, they receive a UK state pension of about £58 a week, while those who went to Jamaica pick up £129 a week.
The way Britain pays state pensions to those who retire abroad is weirdly capricious. There are 134,000 retirees in the US now entitled to a UK state pension after paying their contributions here, and they enjoy annual increases. But across the border in Canada, there are 135,000 UK state pensioners – and they receive no increases at all.
Three years ago, we highlighted the case of Joe Lewis, a 90-year-old former RAF veteran. His state pension was frozen at £48 a week after he retired to Canada. Like hundreds of thousands of other pensioners in his position, he faced serious hardship in old age.
There are 234,000 UK pensioners in Australia, and 65,000 in New Zealand, who receive no increases. But the 132,000 in Ireland and 106,000 in Spain enjoy annual rises.
Official DWP figures in 2018 revealed there are 527,000 British pensioners living in countries where their basic state pension is not uprated annually. It is discriminatory and inhumane. As one daughter of the Windrush generation told us this week: “There seems to be no logic – it’s discriminatory and prejudice. The people most affected by this are rarely qualified to fight the injustice, and of my parents’ generation, too many just ‘put up with it’ and don’t want to ‘rock the boat’, so accept the status quo.”
The Conservatives have been persistently cloth-eared to their plight. The reason? It will cost £500m extra a year if all pensions in payment were increased to current levels, said the then pensions minister, Guy Opperman, in 2018.
The Labour manifesto promises to make amends, though possibly not in full. “We will ensure the pensions of UK citizens living overseas rise in line with pensions in Britain,” it says. That wording allows a lot of wriggle room – it could mean frozen pensions will only be uprated going forward, so the likes of Lewis would see his £48 pension go up by 2.5% a year, not restored to the level of other pensioners retiring today. This policy is estimated to cost between £37m and £200m a year.
It’s shameful how the Tories have ignored these pensioners, and disappointing that Labour won’t extend a fuller guarantee. Yet when it comes to state pensions, Labour has contrived to find £58bn – equal to half a year’s entire spending on the NHS – to fund the rather less convincing claims of the Waspi (Women against state pension increases) group, who now go under the name Back to 60.
Well-off women such as Theresa May would receive a freebie from Labour worth £22,000. It will result in grotesque inequalities – a manual male labourer, aged 59 and earning £20,000 a year, would have to toil until 66 to obtain a state pension. His older sister, aged 63, would receive a £24,000 payout from Labour, although she is comfortably off already. They are a real family I know well. The historical injustice of state pensions has always been the fact that men had to wait until 65, while women received theirs at 60 – and then lived longer. Equality in state pensions has taken far too long to achieve, but at least we are on that path. The same cannot be said about the arbitrary way we treat our pensioners abroad.
p.collinson@theguardian.com
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