STATE PENSION payments are an important form of income for many in retirement. To keep up with rising living costs, the state pension increases each year, under the triple lock mechanism.
MORE than 3,100 British pensioners living in Canada have signed a letter to Boris Johnson urging him to end an injustice so they will not be pushed into poverty.
| UPDATED: 15:22, Tue, Jan 26, 2021
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Both the basic and the new state pension rates will go up in April this year by 2.5 percent. This is thanks to the triple lock, a mechanism which sees the UK state pension rise annually by whichever is the highest out of the average percentage growth in wages in Great Britain, the the percentage growth in prices in the UK as measured by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), and 2.5 percent.
Britain refuses to uprate pensions for citizens who live abroad – even if they have paid National Insurance contributions all their lives – unless the host country has struck an agreement with the UK.
This means Mrs Puckridge receives just £72.50 a week in contrast with the £175.20 weekly rate for pensioners in the UK.
However, hopes for a breakthrough have soared now Canada has asked to negotiate a “reciprocal social security agreement covering the uprating of pensions”.
Mrs Puckridge, who served with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Women’s Royal Naval Service and the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, said: “It is great news that Canada has asked for a reciprocal deal that would end the injustice leaving me on a UK state pension of just £72.50 a week. I urge the UK Government to use this opportunity to end the immoral and indefensible frozen pension policy for UK pensioners in Canada and the hundreds of thousands of other ‘frozen’ pensioners, irrelevant of whe
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