More than 150 politicians from UK and Canada have united to fight the policy whereby British pensioners receive fixed increase rate. The said policy impacts around 453,000 UK state pensioners resident in other countries, and it has been a bone of confrontation between the two nations for many years.
On the same day, the campaigners will drop a letter signed by both parties at Downing Street as they plea with the prime minister, Rishi Sunak to do something about the problem that is making pensioners poverty stricken. The policy withholds full pension rights to individuals who decide to relocate to non-qualifying countries, many of whom mainly do so in their old age to be with their families.
The outcome of this policy is even worse for the more than 100000 pensioners who are living in Canada. Most are getting an average of £65 or less weekly UK state pension compared to today’s full UK state pension of £169.50. This rift has steered up new diplomatic pressure from the Canadian side that has been urging to abolish the policy for over 40 years now.
Campaigners such as the lead campaigner Edwina Melville-Gray took to the parliamentary event held today to continue protesting against the policy. The audience was to include officials of the UK Pensions Minister and members of the Canadian government. Such a level of participation proves the increasing significance of the issue on the political agendas of the two countries.
It has been launched only weeks prior to the planned visit of Anne Puckridge, a World War Two veteran, aged soon to be 100 years old. Puckridge, who is now the face of the campaign, is specifically traveling to meet with the UK Prime Minister to demand a meeting to address the matter. Her daughter Gillian began a petition on the change.org website calling on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to arrange a meeting with Anne to discuss the frozen pensions issue.
The joint letter, with signatures of 50 UK MPs and a membership of more than 100 Canadian MPs, including Steven MacKinnon, the Canadian Secretary of State of the UK equivalent of the ‘Department of Work and Pensions’ who has joined the campaign to end the frozen pensions scheme means that the campaign against the policy has gone to another level. Such a high level of political integration across national borders is not very common, which makes the issue under discussion rather urgent.
The UK government has recently been under increasing pressure from both domestic stakeholders and the international community, and thus, the question of pensions remains an urgent topic in the next few months. If the tensions escalate, as may be the case with Canada, then the government might have to rethink this policy, which has been in place for some years, as the article holds.
By collecting politicians of different parties and countries, the campaign proves that the problem is global, and more and more people realize that the current policy in this field is incorrect and incapable of being carried out. Subsequently, everyone will be waiting for Downing Street, and how the Prime Minister addresses this politics unity and the crisis of hundreds of thousands of the British pensioners living in Europe.