Commons debate on Frozen Pensions
April 20, 2017 Frozen Pensions 2 Comments
On 20 April 2017 the House of Commons debated the payment of UK State Pensions overseas, following the APPG’s successful bid for a Backbench debate on frozen pensions.
You can watch the Commons debate here or below.
Or you can read the Hansard transcript of the debate here.
A full report on this website will follow.
Andy Robertson-Fox
April 24, 2017 - 5:03 pm
Thank you to the members of the APPG for persuading the Backbench Committee to accept the subject for debate and in particular to Sir Roger Gale, Ian Blackford and Greg Mulholland and others for putting the case so clearly.
It was evident that the Minister, Richard Harrington, was somewhat at a loss at the facts placed before him. He resorted to the long discredited arguments of longevity of policy, freedom of choice to go abroad and the reasons for doıng so, affordability and the, were it not so serious, hilarious misrepresentation of the facts surrounding pensioners in Australia.
Thank you APPG – no doubt to reconvene after 8th June, unless the new government has come to its senses in its manıfesto and put the abolition of the policy as a priority!
Robin Davidson
April 25, 2017 - 12:30 pm
I was interested to hear Richard Harrington say that ‘that the scheme overall is primarily designed for those living in the UK’ – that seems to be conjecture not fact. I confess I’ve not read the pensions bill but I doubt very much that it distinguishes who gets up-rating based on domicile. One could argue that it is common sense that the scheme is primarily for UK pensioners but by the same reasoning one could argue that no system would intentionally have been put in place to deliberately discriminate based on country of residence. He also basically said that ‘just because we’ve a surplus we should not just spend it’ but I’d suggest the government considers it an investment to discourage pensioners from returning, encourage pensioners to leave the UK and to buy some kudos from our Commonwealth ‘friends’.