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More than 450,000 pensioners will miss out on the State Pension Triple Lock increase next year, even if they have paid their full contributions. Under the Triple Lock, finance experts predicted the State Pension will increase for milllions of retirees by £551 annually next April.
However, a campaign group warned that around 453,000 British pensioners will not be eligible for the increase if they live in countries without reciprocal social security agreements, including Canada and Australia. Their pensions have been frozen at the level they first received on emigration, and are not eligible for Triple Lock increases, even if they have paid full National Insurance contributions before leaving the UK.
End Frozen Pensions has called on the government for change and warned that, according to their survey, nearly four in ten pensioners said they had to cut down on essential items such as food and medicine as a result of the policy.
The group added that 86% of expats were unaware of the freeze before they moved abroad, and of the 453,000 estimated retirees, more than 60,000 are veterans.
This includes Anne Puckridge, an 100-year-old World War II veteran who worked until she was 76, before moving to Canada to be closer to her family. The group said she now receives less than half the amount she would have received in the UK.
Ms Puckridge met Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds last December, after her request to see Sir Keir Starmer was turned down due to “pressures on his diary”.
However, the war veteran said she had been left feeling “bitterly disappointed” and “disgusted”, and that she believed Ms Reynolds’ mind had been “made up before we even started the meeting”.
A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it provides “clear information on how this can impact their finances in retirement” and the policy of uprating pensions abroad had been a “longstanding one”.
By contrast, British retirees in the EU and US continue to receive full annual increases in line with those in the UK.
The triple lock guarantees pension payments will rise by inflation, earnings growth, or 2.5%—whichever is highest—and next year’s looks like it could be based on annual earnings growth.
Consultancy Broadstone calculated this could add an extra £551 to the yearly figure for pensioners on the full new state pension introduced from April 2016.
Annual payments would go from £11,973 to £12,524 from April 2026, meaning weekly payments would climb from £230.25 to £240.84.
This is based on the predicted 4.6% increase in average earnings, which is currently tracking higher than latest inflation figures of 3.8%.
Final figures have not been released yet, but official wage growth figures for May to July will be released in mid-September, and September’s inflation figure will be revealed in October.
Pensioners must have made sufficient National Insurance contributions during their working lives, bought voluntary NI top-ups, or received credits from the Government for years spent caring or for other reasons.
