New research from the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP) suggests that it could actually be cheaper to uprate the frozen pensions of thousands of overseas Brit retirees.
There are currently around 543,000 British expat retirees who are living abroad with frozen pensions due to their current country not having a reciprocal arrangement with the UK.
This situation has led to much outrage and numerous challenges in court, all of which have proved to be futile.
However the ICBP has now published a report, 'Pension Parity: Can the UK Government afford it?' that has discovered that unfreezing the pensions could actually save money in the long term.
A number of British pensioners were interviewed for the report, and just under half stated that they would like to retire abroad, but 39 percent of these people also said that they were deterred by the pension freeze risk. The report then argues that without the freeze, a large portion of retirees would choose to leave the UK, thus saving money through unused benefits.
John Markham, from the ICBP, said: “Every person who retires abroad saves the Government around £4,000 per year, and we estimate that around 7,000 people retire to countries where pensions are frozen every year. This number would clearly increase if the freeze was lifted.”