A petition calling for state pensioners whose payments are frozen to be increased to the current rates is gaining support.
The Parliament petition says it is “discriminatory, unjust and immoral” that some 500,000 state pensioners do not get the yearly increase because they live in countries where the uprating is not applied.
More than 2,500 people have pledged their support for the campaign and if it reaches 10,000 signatures, the Government will issue a response.
The petition states: “We want the state pensions of these individuals to be increased to current rates, and to receive annual increases in future.
“We believe the need for reciprocal social security agreements has long passed as other countries already pay their pensioners in the UK annual increases. We believe the freezing of UK citizens pensioners is discriminatory, unjust and immoral.”
To get the yearly state pension increase, a person has to live in one of these countries:
- the UK
- the European Economic Area
- Gibraltar
- Switzerland
- Countries with a social security agreement with the UK (not Canada or New Zealand).
Figures from the DWP showed that in March 2022, there were some 480,000 poeple living overseas whose state pension is frozen.
This included 403,200 people, or 84 percent of the total, who live in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
State pensioners are on track for another large increase this year with payments to set to go up 8.5 percent in line with the figure for average earnings.
However, there have been reports the Government is considering using the average earnings figure not including bonuses, which would drop the increase to 7.8 percent.
Jon Greer, head of retirement policy at Quilter, previously told Express.co.uk the Government would be unwise to tamper with the triple lock at this stage.
He said: “The triple lock has been a central tenet of Government policy and to water it down could cause uproar amongst the Tory core supporters, regardless of whether the earnings figure is still higher than the other two metrics of 2.5 percent and July’s CPI figure of 6.8 percent.”
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