I hope the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) will forgive me if I do not follow her line of debate, but we have less than 50 minutes left to deal with something that is complicated, important and a matter of justice.
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister for saying in the Commonwealth that the Commonwealth is about fairness and justice, and I am going to argue for a significant review of what we do with overseas pensioners. I hope the House will forgive me for reading out a paragraph from Lord Hoffmann in the Carson case concerning regulation 5 of the Social Security Benefit (Persons Abroad) Regulations 1975:
“The general rule, subject to limited exceptions, has always been that social security benefits are payable only to inhabitants of the United Kingdom. A person ‘absent from Great Britain’ is disqualified: section 113(1) of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992. But there is a power to make exceptions by regulation. Regulation 4 of the Social Security Benefit (Persons Abroad) Regulations 1975 (SI 1975/563) (deemed to have been made under the 1992 Act) makes such an exception for retirement pensions. But regulation 5 makes an exception to the exception. In the absence of reciprocal treaty arrangements, persons ordinarily resident abroad continue to be disqualified from receiving the annual increases.”
The House might expect that pensioners abroad who do not get the increases are the exception; were the House to think that, it would be wrong. Some 650,000 overseas pensioners get the increase, and they include pensioners in countries such as the United States and Jamaica. More than 500,000—it could be 530,000 or 570,000—do not. They are predominantly in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Pakistan, with Yemen and Japan being two others in the top ten. No one can claim that there is rhyme or reason in that.
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Before I was elected to this House, the then MP Julian Ridsdale had a debate in 1972 answered by the Minister, Paul Dean, who said that these matters were governed by reciprocal treaties and that the Government were keen on having such treaties. If the Prime Minister today were to invite various Government Departments to contribute to a whole of Government review—which is what I would ask for—he would find that the Foreign Office now says openly that it does not want reciprocal agreements, in part because some of the old dominions and Commonwealth countries provide increases to their pensioners in Britain without us agreeing to do the same thing there. That does not strike me as a good argument not to have reciprocal agreements; it strikes me as a good argument for having them. Were he to ask for this review, the Prime Minister would probably hear from the DWP, “Is this the year when it is a priority to give increases to those who are not resident in this country?”
The reason this is relevant to today’s debate is that the Secretary of State, in clause 20, purports to exclude overseas pensioners from getting increases under the new scheme except—although it does not quite say so—where regulations can be made that would allow them to do it; the exception to the exception. I will spare the House analysis of the provision in clause 18, which is too complicated even for me to be able to put across in a way that anyone else would understand. In clause 20, the Government are proposing deliberately to continue the discrimination against some of our overseas pensioners. There is no rhyme or reason. Being a member of the Commonwealth does not bring someone in or put them out, although it is what I call the old dominions who are affected.
The DWP might ask why we should do it now. The argument that Julian Ridsdale was putting forward in 1972 was about a far smaller number of people. If my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State were to say that 2% of our pensioners are abroad, that is a dramatically higher proportion than in 1972, and it will grow. People who will earn their rights to pensions in this country are a far more mobile population, both those coming here and those going out. We know that, with the expansion
of the EU, those countries with whom we would not have necessarily claimed a very close connection over generations will come in. Without wanting to stir up some of the popular newspapers, the new members of the EU will not be excluded from getting increases in pensions, whether their people come here and work and earn entitlement or whether people who are resident in or nationals of our country go and live, for example, in Bulgaria or Romania. They will get the increases. Those who may have retired to South Africa shortly after the 1947 Pensions Act do not.
The reason is that, in 1947, we were not expecting to get inflation. If we did not have inflation, we would not have the problem. If the Government say that they will not provide exceptions to clause 20 and that no pensioner overseas will get an increase, at least we would have consistency. But that is not what the Minister is proposing. It might be helpful if he could confirm that either now, or if and when he comes to speak.