A 99-year-old British WW2 veteran has travelled 4,400 miles from her home in Canada to ask Sir Keir Starmer to unfreeze her pension – but the PM has turned down a meeting with her.
Anne Puckridge – who turns 100 on December 20 – has had her pension frozen since 2001 when she retired and moved to Canada to be closer to her family.
She receives state pension of just £72.50 a week, in comparison to the inflated current rate of £169.50 if she had stayed in Britain.
Puckridge – who underwent half a century of tax-paying work in Britain – has calculated a loss of around £60,000 over the 23 years she has lived outside the UK.
A 99-year-old British WW2 veteran has travelled 4,400 miles from her Canada home to ask Keir Starmer to unfreeze her pension – but the PM has turned down a meeting with her.
PA
She said the refusal of the Government to uprate her pension has left her feeling “ashamed to be British.”
The war veteran won two medals for her service in WW2 – the India Service Medal and the War Medal.
She now says, “Christmas and birthdays are sad occasions,” as she is unable to treat her grandchildren due to her low income.
Puckridge has attempted to lobby successive governments to give fair pensions since 2018 and has today arrived in Westminster.
She has been granted a meeting with Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds, however the Prime Minister has said he cannot meet her due to “pressures on his diary.”
Puckridge helped defeat the Nazis in WW2 – decoding German cyphers as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force aged just 17.
She said that when she first informed the DWP of her move to Canada in 2001, no one mentioned her pension would be frozen.
The war veteran is not alone in her cause – she is also calling on the Government to “end the suffering of 450,000 ‘frozen’ overseas pensioners.”
Most British pensioners in Europe and the US are covered by the “triple lock” where, like Britain, the state pension rises with the rate of inflation.
But across the rest of the world, British pensioners pay the price of frozen pensions and are forced to make ends meet, with some living in poverty.
Puckridge says amending this “injustice” would “cost less than one per cent of the state pension budget.”
A petition calling on the PM to meet with Puckridge was set up by her daughter Gillian Mittins and has now received over 130,000 signatures.
It demands “justice in the name of every single victim of the ‘Frozen Pensions’ scandal.”
Former chef and pub manager Alex Dilworth, 77, resettled in Australia aged 39. Seven years ago, when he retired, he discovered his pension had been frozen since 1986 at the rate of just £38.70 a week.
He said he is “cutting back” – he has started to cook in bulk and stopped drinking alcohol due to the expense. Two of his friends – both ex-Navy seamen – are also victims of frozen pension.
“Everybody’s suffering” he added. The institute for Economic Affairs think tank said freezing pensions is not “a principled way” of saving government money.
A spokesperson from the DWP told the BBC: “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.”