UK Parliament / Open data

Pensions Bill

Proceeding contribution from Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour) in the House of Lords on Wednesday, 8 January 2014. It occurred during Debate on bills and Committee proceeding on Pensions Bill.

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord again; he is being very tolerant, for which I am grateful. Again, I am relying on my memory, which is probably faulty, but something in the order of 85% of overseas pensioners outside the EU are in the four major Anglo-Saxon countries. However, the countries in which most of us would recognise that there are anomalies are not so much the big four Anglo-Saxon countries, which have decent social security systems for poverty relief as a safety net and so on. This is about the mixed history of some Caribbean islands, which came in under the net, before 1979, for protection of overseas pensioners, while others did not. Once we started inflating pensions by the cost of living—I am not sure that this was accidental—bilateral relations disappeared at that point because they started to reflect the British cost of living. Those countries are so

poor that they are looking for a form of aid in the form of pensions. How would the noble Lord justify coming to a mutually advantageous deal with a relatively wealthy country like Canada while, because an appropriately mutually advantageous offer could not be made with Caribbean islands, that opportunity would be refused to some of the poorer countries?

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

750 c410GC 

Session

2013-14

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords Grand Committee

Legislation

Pensions Bill 2013-14
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