Pensions Bill

I support the amendment and wish that my noble friend and, indeed, the Minister would go further. I became aware of this issue when I represented Cheltenham in another place. The matter was first brought to my attention by a lady who wished to retire to Canada, where her only son lived. She found out quite late that her pension would be frozen if she went to Canada. She did not want to live with her son and his family, but she wanted to be nearby to see her grandchildren grow up. She did not wish to be dependent upon her relatives. She did not understand why her pension would be frozen and thought that there had been a mistake. She wrote to the then DSS and showed me the letters explaining the Government’s position that she had received in reply. Frankly, I did not believe it at the time. However, further correspondence ensued and confirmed that on the day she would leave the United Kingdom to go to Canada her pension would have been frozen. She waited, expecting the then Government to change those rules, because she was convinced that it was a mistake, but nothing happened. She eventually said, ““Look, I’m getting so old that I’ve got to go””. She was 70 when she went to Canada, and she did not think that she had long left to live. I am pleased to say that she is now 80, having spent 10 years in Canada, but her pension has diminished in real terms over that time. She sends me regular e-mails. Some of them are stroppy and one of them described a recent tornado in Toronto—so she also keeps her eye on climate change. This issue has also been raised with me on my foreign travels, particularly by a vociferous Welsh butcher in Botswana. Perhaps I should declare an interest here, because my family owns a house in Botswana and it might be thought that I am pleading on my own behalf because I might retire to Botswana. I have no intention of doing so yet, but if reform of the House of Lords proceeds apace one never knows what might happen. I and my noble friend Lord Oakeshott have mentioned Canada, where the pensioners are well organised. They do not understand why the pensions of people living down the road in the United States of America are uprated, but their own pensions are not. I am told that two of my former constituents who worked at GCHQ retired across the pond, one to Canada and the other to the United States. They had worked in the same departments at GCHQ, at the same grade and had presumably made the same national insurance contributions. One of them receives the uprated pension and the other does not. That is not justifiable. Like my noble friend, I wanted to raise the issue of the tiny number of people in the British Overseas Territories. Answers to my Parliamentary Questions have indicated that the cost of getting rid of the frozen pensions issue for the relatively few people affected in the British Overseas Territories would be less than £0.5 million. In Treasury terms, that is loose change. I would like the Minister to look closely at that. We have heard about reciprocal agreements and I wonder how such an agreement might be negotiated with one of the British Overseas Territories. Presumably the Governor of St Helena or wherever would put on his feathered hat and say, ““The people of St Helena require their pensions to be unfrozen””. He would then have to take off the hat, move to the other side of the table and have a discussion with himself. That would obviously be ludicrous, but it might be good material for a ““Monty Python”” sketch, if ““Monty Python”” were still producing new sketches. I know that the Minister will tell us about the cost of unfreezing pensions. My noble friend’s amendment is relatively inexpensive. Certainly, the unfreezing of pensions in the British Overseas Territories would be inexpensive and affordable. Before we reach Report, will the Minister get his department to produce costings for unfreezing pensions for all the relevant territories? We know that the estimate is £420 million a year, which would escalate each year as pensions increased, but can he produce an estimate of the cost of unfreezing pensions for the over-80s, who are most in need, like my friend Mrs B? What about the over-75s? Perhaps the Minister would produce a list of the potential costs relating to each age group. Now that the Minister, James Purnell, has said during Committee in the other place that it is not legally necessary to have a reciprocal arrangement before making such payments, presumably the Government can change their policy once they decide that it would be affordable to do so. I hope that the Minister in this House will provide some assurance that the Government are looking seriously at this issue.