§ Lord Stallardasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they have plans to open negotiations with Commonwealth governments, with a view to establishing reciprocal arrangements for payment of increases to retirement pensions paid to retired United Kingdom citizens domiciled in Commonwealth countries to bring them into line with United Kingdom retirement pensioners living in any one of over 30 non-Commonwealth countries who currently receive all pension increases as for United Kingdom pensioners living in the United Kingdom; and what they are. [HL2088]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Social Security (Baroness Hollis of Heigham)State pensions paid to UK pensioners living in the major Commonwealth countries are not increased in line with pensions in the UK. There continue to be competing demands and constraints on social security spending in the UK. Therefore, the Government consider that it would be wrong to raise expectations that moves to unfreeze UK pensions paid abroad would be likely to attract priority in the current circumstances.
About 800,000 UK state pensions are paid to pensioners who live abroad. Four hundred thousand of these are not uprated, mainly paid to pensioners living in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It would cost some £250 million a year to unfreeze those pensions—that is, to bring them up to the rate which would be paid if the pensioners were in the UK.