This weekend, a few weeks before her 100th birthday, a former wartime intelligence officer will set off on a new mission: to meet with the UK pensions minister and persuade her to end an “injustice”.
Anne Puckridge is travelling 4,400 miles from her home in Canada to ask the UK government to change rules that campaigners say penalise almost half a million pensioners living overseas and leave many struggling financially.
Many of them, including Puckridge, receive a state pension that is a fraction of what they would get if they had stayed in the UK or moved to one of a list of other countries.
This is because although the UK state pension is payable overseas, it is not “uprated” annually unless there is a legal requirement to do so – for example, where there is a relevant reciprocal social security agreement in place.
About 480,000 older Britons living abroad are affected by this “frozen pensions” policy. Their state pensions do not increase each year, but stay at the level reached on the date the individual moved away if they had already retired, or became entitled to the payment if they were already living overseas.
The rules apply to the old basic state pension and the new state pension introduced in 2016. The full basic state pension is now £169.50 a week, and, for many pensioners, will rise by 4.1% in April to reach £176.45.
But those Britons who emigrated or retired to more than 100 countries including Australia, Canada and South Africa will not benefit from the increase.
Some “frozen” pensioners have missed years of rises and, as a result, receive as little as £20 a week.
Puckridge says she has been punished by the British government for deciding in 2001, at the age of 76, to move to Canada to be close to her daughter. She served as an intelligence officer during the second world war, and worked on codes across the army, RAF and navy. Puckridge then returned to the UK and brought up her family, working in administrative jobs and, later, as a lecturer in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
Despite the fact she lived and worked in the UK for most of her life, making national insurance contributions throughout her career, her UK basic state pension is frozen at the 2001 level of £72.50.
Since then Puckridge has received £50,000 less than had she spent the last 23 years in the UK. She says the pension freeze has affected “virtually every decision in my life”.
She adds: “I can’t remember when I bought anything new, and I have to limit even essential purchases to thrift and similar stores. Social activity and entertainment are mainly only memories, and festive seasons such as the approaching Christmas or birthdays are embarrassing rather than exciting events.”
The End Frozen Pensions campaign says the current regime is “cruel and unnecessary”.
Puckridge is due to arrive in the UK on Sunday and had formally requested a meeting with Keir Starmer.
Her call was backed by the actor Joanna Lumley and more than 30 UK parliamentarians, including the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
A petition on the Change.org website launched by Puckridge’s daughter Gillian Mittins that urged Starmer to “meet with my 99-year-old second world war veteran mum” had by Thursday received more than 130,000 signatures.
However, it emerged on Thursday that Starmer had declined to see her, but had offered her a meeting with the pensions minister, Emma Reynolds.
Puckridge says she is “deeply saddened and disappointed” that the prime minister feels unable to meet her and hopes he will reconsider, but adds that she appreciates his offer of an alternative meeting with the minister.
While in the UK, she will meet MPs, attend prime minister’s questions in the Commons and be hosted by the Canadian high commission in London.
She says: “I will be 100 years old in a few weeks’ time, and the decision to take the journey back to the UK at this stage of my life is not one I have taken lightly … We feel our country has cruelly abandoned us.”
The frozen pensions policy has been in place for decades, and ministers have in the past conceded the rules are “illogical”. However, various governments have argued it would be too expensive to uprate those affected, saying that the priority should be targeting money at the poorest pensioners at home.
Last year, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said changing the rules would cost more than £4.5bn in total for the five years ending April 2028.
But campaigners said a recent freedom of information (FoI) response from the DWP showed that the cost of meeting their demand for annual increases for all from now on – as opposed to a full retrospective uprating – would be £55m in the first year.
A government spokesperson said the figures in the FoI “highlight the cost of a partial uprating only”, and that to fully uprate people’s pensions would cost nearly £1bn a year.
They added: “We understand people move abroad for many reasons, and we provide clear information on how this can impact their finances in retirement, with the policy on the uprating of the UK state pension for recipients living overseas a longstanding one.”