State Pensions: UK Expatriates

Greg Mulholland Excerpts

Thursday 20th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), chair of the all-party parliamentary group on frozen British pensions, for his tireless and forceful campaigning on this issue over many years. I am proud to be a member of that group, but it is very much about his determination to see an end to this injustice. I hope that his campaigning, both personally and collectively, will soon start to bear the fruit that it deserves.

We are having this debate in an unexpected context. It was announced before the Easter recess, when none of us—even those on the Government Benches—had any idea that we would see Parliament dissolved and a general election. I think that is partly why fewer hon. and right hon. Members are here than there would otherwise have been, which is a shame. However, I was going to make the point anyway that there is a simple reason why this issue has never been resolved and Governments have been able to ignore it again and again. I say “Governments” because, as the hon. Gentleman said, it has been ignored by successive Governments. This is not a party political issue. All parties have failed to deal with it during their times in government.

I love and am hugely proud of being my constituency’s representative. Representing Leeds North West is the part of my job that I love most. However, the reality is that these 550,000 British citizens, who are the same as every one of us here and as all our constituents who are UK citizens, do not have an MP. They do not have a single person who directly represents them and fights their cause in the way that we all do when we receive constituents in our surgeries who tell us about injustices that they face. One MP, or groups of us, can take up those issues and campaign until we finally get Ministers, of whatever colour or Government, to make a change. This group of people do not have an MP. They are disenfranchised and are not represented. Constitutionally, the length of time that this injustice has endured means that it may now be time to look at what France and other countries do and somehow have representation for our UK citizens who live abroad.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) on securing this debate. I supported his bid.

Does the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) recall our meeting in the House of Commons two or three months ago with a number of people who had come from overseas to make representations? Surely it is bad when people have to come from overseas, at great expense, to lobby Members of the Westminster Parliament. This issue goes back to the 1960s, so he is right to refer to successive Governments. This has gone on for far, far too long.

[Greg Mulholland]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I pay tribute to the dogged campaigners who have worked with the all-party parliamentary group. Their campaigning is remarkable, particularly given the distances involved. The situation he highlights makes my point even more clear. This group of campaigners, these British citizens, came to Parliament, but who could they directly contact? We meet our constituents when they come to lobby us, and we point people who come from another part of the country to their own MP, but we do not represent people who contact us from Canada, Africa or wherever it is because they are not our constituents. I pay tribute to the members of the APPG, and particularly to the very active members and the chair, for being prepared to represent such people through friendship.

Many of us have come to this issue because we have been told about a constituent’s relative or friend, or perhaps because we know someone in this situation. I do not know such a person, incidentally, but I have come to the conclusion, simply by engaging with, listening to and reading the arguments, that this disgraceful injustice cannot continue. It is morally wrong and legally deeply questionable. Ultimately, the position taken by successive Governments in ignoring the issue and using the same standard excuse for many years, despite this Government recently saying that they will look into the matter, will be shown to be legally unsustainable in an increasingly globalised world.

Let us remind ourselves that this is happening in the context of post-Brexit turmoil, which will have all sorts of effects. In the future there will be a very real threat to UK citizens who live in the European Union, and I know the APPG will lobby strongly to ensure that the situation is resolved as part of the Brexit negotiations. We discuss freedom of movement and immigration, but we forget to talk about emigration and the fact that many British citizens, for very good reasons, use their right to go to live and work, or retire, in another country.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

This topic is important to many people, and not only those living abroad who left the UK for very good reasons, including people who migrated here in the 1950s and have since gone back to live in India, Pakistan, Australia and other places. Those people have contributed to this country’s economic and social life. I congratulate the APPG and its chair on raising these issues and on meeting and listening to the Australian campaigners who came here. I hope that the next Government will take this on board and ensure that these people are not disadvantaged.

[Greg Mulholland]

The hon. Gentleman is right that this is not only unjust but clearly discriminatory, particularly to those in certain diaspora groups. As he knows, Leeds and West Yorkshire have a proud and strong Asian community. I am proud to have a mosque and a Hindu temple in my constituency, and the next constituency has a wonderful Sikh temple, and those wonderful communities are very much part of the life of the community and economy in Leeds. Members of any of those communities are discriminated against, in exactly the same way as anyone else, if they choose to go back to their country of origin, perhaps to live with family or to support family members. That is another reason why this is legally questionable as well as clearly unsustainable.

We are proud to live in a globalised world, whatever side we took in the EU debate. I did not hear anyone say, certainly not in this House, that we should stop wanting to play our full part in the world. I did not hear anyone say that we should stop wanting people from other countries to work in our economy and our health service. Equally, I did not hear anyone say that we want to stop our own citizens having the right to emigrate. In a globalised world we have people who choose to marry a foreign citizen and live in their spouse’s country to find work. This injustice is effectively denying the right of real freedom of movement to all the citizens of this country, which is extraordinary in a globalised world and in a nation that purports to want to play its full part. We are proud to have citizens living in and contributing to America, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa. If their family have decided to live, work and make their lives in another country, it is understandable that some old people would wish to retire to be with them.

Indeed, as the hon. Member for North Thanet said, there is a huge saving to this nation when someone chooses to emigrate—the estimated annual saving is £3,800—yet we are not prepared to uprate their state pension, which they have paid into, even though the figure would clearly be significantly lower.

We cannot have a situation, as we have now, in which some UK citizens who choose to retire abroad have their pensions uprated and some do not. There is also now uncertainty for people who intend to retire to the European Union, and of course more people who are married to an EU citizen are now deciding that they would rather live in the European Union.

We need to get a grip on the issue and stop the disparity between people in countries that happen to have a bilateral agreement and people in countries that still do not. The Minister has an opportunity to put that right in this Government, unless he has something wonderful to announce today. He, like all of us on both sides of the House, needs to ensure that the issue is addressed. Let us make a firm commitment that whoever is here in the next Parliament from 9 June will ensure that this injustice is at least partially resolved by the next general election in 2022.

After the election it is clear that the Government, of whatever colour—people do not particularly question what colour the next Government will be—must do something, because they can act unilaterally in this case. There does not have to be bilateral agreement. A Government could act on the basis of justice and of wanting to resolve the matter by making a unilateral decision to make a change for all cases.

We need to do this properly and ensure that people living all around the world all get the proper state pension; that is the only real form of justice on this. We need to decide that from now on people should get the state pension that they paid into and that they deserve, regardless of whether they live abroad, particularly as they are not costing the NHS money and are not part of the ongoing crisis in social care, which, again, successive Government have failed to deal with in this country.

Clearly, the Government will not commit to doing this at the moment, although they should. I still challenge the idea that introducing a proper state pension for all citizens abroad would necessarily lead to backdating. That view is overcautious, and legislation could be brought forward carefully to avoid that situation.

A commitment has to be made to the partial uprating that has been pushed by the all-party group and mentioned today by the hon. Member for North Thanet. The estimated cost is very modest, even in the context of wider spending demands. It is a modest change, and it clearly could and should be made early in the next Parliament to help those who have suffered, and the many people whose standard of living has been affected. Remember that many of these people are not well off; they are not rich. Many of them are ordinary people who have chosen to live abroad for very good reasons, such as those I have described. As was movingly set out by the hon. Gentleman, this injustice, which has gone on for many years, has meant that older pensioners are facing penury. They are living in poverty because of this injustice perpetrated by the British state, so we need a commitment to partial uprating. It would be wonderful to get it today, but that is unlikely in the context of the general election.

I am committed to campaigning on this in future, if I am returned to this place after the 8 June election. I will carry on making this case, even though I am not doing it for constituents, because this is about justice. I pay tribute to my colleague in the other place, Baroness Benjamin, who is also a member of our group and who has been very vocal on this issue in the Lords; I am sure that she and others will continue being so. I do not write the Liberal Democrat manifesto—they would not let me, although it would be very good if they did—but partial uprating should be in all the manifestos; the election has provided an opportunity for that. We should all commit to that, to ensure that uprating happens in the next Parliament. I will certainly put that to my party leader, and I hope others will do the same, because this is not a party political issue. It never has been. There is no direct criticism of any one party; there has simply been a failure on this, for the reasons I laid out.

Representative democracy has failed people who choose to move away from constituencies and no longer have one. Perhaps we could examine that. In the meantime, I hope that all parties, all members of the group and the Minister will consider whether it is finally time to commit to bringing in at least partial uprating, so that this clearly unjustifiable injustice is at last dealt with, and Governments of all colours stop ignoring it and looking away.