Frozen Pensions

The problem

The UK state pension is uprated every year for people living in the UK. It is also uprated for those living in the European Economic Area, the USA and a number of other countries with which the UK has a reciprocal agreement.

In most other countries it is not. A British citizen who has paid National Insurance for a full working life and retires to a country without an agreement receives the rate in payment on the day they first claim — and that same cash figure for the rest of their life.

The effect compounds. Inflation does not pause because someone has moved abroad, so a frozen pension falls in real terms every single year. Two people with identical contribution records can receive very different amounts purely because of the country they retired to. A pensioner who moved to Canada and one who moved to the United States are treated differently despite sharing a border.

More than 450,000 pensioners are affected. Many are people who moved to be near children or grandchildren, or who returned to a country where they had family ties, and who did not discover the consequence until years afterwards.

Why it is not simply a cost question

The usual objection is cost. BOVF's position is that the argument has changed in a way that has not yet been absorbed by policymakers.

Until January 2024, most of the people affected could not vote. The 15-year rule meant that a pensioner who had lived abroad for two decades had no representation at all, and a group with no votes is a group whose problem can be deferred indefinitely.

The Elections Act 2022 abolished that rule on 16 January 2024. Every British citizen previously resident or registered in the UK can now vote in UK parliamentary elections for life. The 450,000 people whose pensions are frozen are electors. That is a change of circumstance, not a change of argument, and it is the reason BOVF asks every frozen pensioner it meets the same first question: are you registered?

What we are doing

BOVF's Frozen Pensions policy group, led by Vice Chair Lloyd Hobbard-Mitchell, works on remedies that a UK politician can realistically defend to a domestic audience — not simply a demand for more money. We have raised the issue in meetings with MPs across parties and through the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Citizens' Rights.

We work alongside longstanding campaigners on this issue rather than competing with them. Our distinctive contribution is the link to registration: an unregistered pensioner is invisible to the political system, and a registered one is a constituent.