More than 3,500 Britons have signed their support for a petition calling for the state pension increase to be applied to 500,000 people who miss out on the yearly uprating.
Campaigners say the policy which means many people do not get the state pension because of where they live is “discriminatory, unjust and immoral”.
The Parliamentary petition has garnered 3,607 signatures at the time of writing, calling for the frozen payments to be increased to the current rates that UK citizens receive.
The petition states: “Approximately 500,000 of 1.2 million state pension recipients living abroad do not receive increases to their state pension in the same way as other state pension recipients.
“We want the state pensions of these individuals to be increased to current rates, and to receive annual increases in future.
“We believe the need for reciprocal social security agreements has long passed as other countries already pay their pensioners in the UK annual increases. We believe the freezing of UK citizens pensioners is discriminatory, unjust and immoral.”
To get the yearly state pension increase, a person has to live in one of these countries:
- the UK
- the European Economic Area
- Gibraltar
- Switzerland
- Countries with a social security agreement with the UK (not Canada or New Zealand).
Figures from the DWP showed that in March 2022, there were some 480,000 poeple living overseas whose state pension is frozen.
This included 403,200 people, or 84 percent of the total, who live in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
State pensioners are on track for another large increase this year with payments to set to go up 8.5 percent in line with the figure for average earnings.
However, there have been reports the Government is considering using the average earnings figure not including bonuses, which would drop the increase to 7.8 percent.
Jon Greer, head of retirement policy at Quilter, previously told Express.co.uk the Government would be unwise to tamper with the triple lock at this stage.
He said: “The triple lock has been a central tenet of Government policy and to water it down could cause uproar amongst the Tory core supporters, regardless of whether the earnings figure is still higher than the other two metrics of 2.5 percent and July’s CPI figure of 6.8 percent.”
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