Time to end state pension injustice for Caribbean recipients

The legacy of slavery and colonialism continues to blight the lives and pensions of many retirees who are living out their retirement in the Caribbean and elsewhere. This injustice must be addressed.

During Black History Month, an annual event that happens in October, there are often many debates and discussions about the legacy of slavery and colonialism.

This was particularly so this year when Caribbean leaders called for a high-level summit with European nations including Britain to discuss reparations for slavery, insisting that the issue must be addressed.

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer followed the previous government’s line in declining to discuss this, preferring to look to the future rather than the past.

Many might think that as slavery was abolished in the 19th century it’s all distant history and has no relevance to today. But one only needs to read the 10-point reparation plan set out by the Reparations Commission established by Caricom, the organisation of Caribbean states, to see its lasting impact down the centuries. A crisis of community poverty remains.

It points out that 400 years of deliberate denial of technology to the Caribbean states meant that they entered their nation-building phases technologically and scientifically ill-equipped within the postmodern world economy.

Aside from the economic consequences of slavery, the centuries of poor nutrition and overly salted foods given to the enslaved have transmitted an inter-generational tendency for hypertension.

For example, the African descended population in the Caribbean has been left with the highest incidence in the world of chronic diseases in the form of hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.

Ending a pension injustice

What has all this got to do with pensions? Well, there is one issue that, if addressed, might at least send a signal that the UK is beginning to acknowledge the legacy of inequality that it is responsible for between itself and its former colonies, and that is the issue of pensions uprating for people who retire overseas with a UK state pension.

There are about 450,000 people living abroad with a UK pension, some of whom are people with African, Caribbean or Asian heritage who wish to live out their retirement in those countries. Some may even have been recruited abroad to fill the gaps in our ailing NHS.

But when they decide to do this, many discover that they are not entitled to any increase at all in their state pension once they move abroad. UK state pensions are payable worldwide, but are only uprated overseas where there is a legal requirement to do so – for example, where there is a reciprocal agreement in place that allows for uprating. This has been going on for 70 years.

State pension payments are uprated in the European Union and the US, plus 17 other countries, only four of which are in Africa or the Caribbean. Pension payments to those in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are not uprated.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Frozen British Pensions explains what this means for the pensioners:

• A pensioner aged 90 who has lived in a ‘frozen’ country (i.e. with no uprating) for all of their retirement would now still get a state pension of just £64.70 per week. If they had lived in the UK, they would currently receive £156.20.

• A pensioner aged 72 who became pensionable in a frozen country in 2016 would receive a state pension of £119.30 per week this year. This is in stark contrast to the £203.85 they would be receiving in the UK under the new state pension.

This is leaving nearly half a million people – all of whom have worked in the UK and contributed to our society – at greater and greater risk of abject poverty the older they get.

In July last year Lord Davies of Brixton raised this issue in the House of Lords, pointing out that it heaps further injustice on the Windrush generation.

He said: “Those in Barbados and Jamaica are the lucky ones, but there are 300 people with frozen pensions in Antigua and Barbuda, 1,300 in Trinidad and Tobago, 900 in Grenada, 800 in St Lucia, and hundreds more spread across other Caribbean islands.

“The injustice of the policy is clear, but the government and past governments have hidden behind the need for so-called reciprocal agreement – we pay increases to our pensioners in [a country] only if it pays increases to its pensioners in the UK.”

He added that for years successive governments have consistently refused to negotiate any more such agreements, leading to the “entirely arbitrary distinctions we see today”.

“Members of the Windrush generation were invited to live and work in the UK to help run Britain, and they devoted their working lives to this country,” he said. “It is manifestly wrong to punish them so severely simply because they have returned to their countries of birth for retirement.”

The unfairness of this is clear. It is also obvious that pensioners, as they age, take up more NHS and state resources – so relocating abroad saves the government money.

The unfairness becomes even greater when seen in the context of the legacy of slavery and colonialism. This has gone on for 70 years and it's time this injustice is rectified.

Janice Turner is co-chair of the Association of Member-Nominated Trustees