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Frozen in Indonesia: Information for UK Pensioners in Indonesia
Are you a British expat that is receiving the UK state pension?
(or will be in the future!)
You will be well aware that the UK state pension you get was frozen when you moved to Indonesia to make your permanent home. (i.e., no longer resident in the UK). Meaning that your state pension is now as it was when you made that permanent move. The annual increases in the pension are not passed on to you as they are to UK resident pensioners. The increases are also made to pensioners whom live in an E.U. country and some other countries.
I am sure that you will agree this is not fair. Just because you live in another country, why should you be discriminated against? No doubt you paid your National Insurance contributions for all of your working life in the UK, possibly for 40 years or so. The government policy says equality for all. Where is the equality for pensioners that are on frozen pensions? Where is the increase to cover the cost of living increases? I think you will have noticed that the cost of living here has gone up as well as in the UK!
The International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP) has been fighting to get this ridiculous situation corrected so that all pensioners are treated as equal. They went to the E.U. courts but lost their case and many comments have been made on the way the government replied to their case. They, the ICBP, are continuing the fight and branches in other countries such as Australia and Canada are active in this fight.
It has been suggested that I might be able to assist by finding out how many U.K. state pensioners are living in Indonesia. I hope that every British expat state pensioner (or those getting close to pension age) affected by the frozen pension situation will send me an email with a little (non-personal) information (A user name, email address, location in Indonesia, approximate date you started to receive the UK pension and the date you became “frozen”), that I can compile and pass on to the ICBP. Every little bit of “ammo” will be useful to the cause. It won’t take too much of your time so please help.
Let's take action to rectify this!
Please email this information to clida2000@yahoo.com
I would ask you to “chat amongst yourselves” about this subject and I suggest you take a look at the following websites (there are many others!).
It is quoted that pensioners in the UK cost the government £8,000 a year. Frozen pensioners living abroad cost £1,000 a year: frozen pensioners save the government £2.5bn a year. The government says it can’t afford to pay the increase, yet they are lowering the number of years required for full pension from 40 to 30 years contribution.
There are many people that have written on this subject and I would ask you to spare a couple of hours “researching” this subject and hopefully join the battle for equal rights on pensions.
Quotes from The International Consortium of British Pensioners
"There are between 11 and 12 Million UK Basic State Pensioners. 96% of them have their pensions indexed every year, whether they live in the UK, Europe, the USA or a few other favoured countries. The National Insurance Fund is currently in balance to the tune of over 41 Billion Pounds Sterling, as of 30 September 2010."
"4 % of UK State Pensioners have their pensions FROZEN, because they have retired in countries where their pensions are NOT indexed. At the hearing in the European Court of Human Rights in 2009 even the lawyers representing Britain agreed that the cost of rectifying this anomaly would be less than 1% of the annual National Insurance income."
So, please spare a bit of time to get involved and drop me an email.