§ Sir John FarrTo ask the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will give the calculations on which he based the figure of £25 million for the first year cost of paying future increases to British pensioners living in Canada, which was contained in his observations on the parliamentary petition of the hon. Member for Harborough dated 12 April.
§ Mr. Nicholas Scott[holding answer 26 May]: The figure of £2.5 million in observations on this petition for the first year cost at 1988 rates of paying pension increases to British pensioners in Canada was wrongly printed on the Order Paper as £25 million.
I regret that the figure of £2.5 million was itself incorrect. The cost has now been recalculated on the basis of statistics for December 1987 at which date the number of pensioners in Canada was 76,152. The current cost of the pensions payable to these pensioners is estimated, on the basis of a sample, to be approximately £61.5 million, while the cost if the pensions were not frozen would have been about £106 million before the last uprating. The hypothetical cost of the 1988 uprating has been calculated by applying this year's uprating factor of 4.2 per cent. to this nominal cost of £106 million, giving a figure of £4.4 million. This recosting also shows that to pay full United Kingdom rates of pension immediately to all British pensioners in Canada would cost an extra £48.6 million and to do the same for all pensioners abroad would cost about £205 million.