Expat data tracking Brits around the world for the past two decades shows the favourite destinations for work and retirement have changed little in that time.
The top 10 destinations show only two real surprises – and they have a fingerhold in the bottom two places.
The unexpected destinations are
- Germany – With 100,000 British expats – and almost a third are pensioners
- United Arab Emirates – With 65,000 British expats but only 680 pensioners. And for UAE read mainly Dubai.
These figures come from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) as opposed to the more widely quoted and discredited figures from the UK Border Agency.
The agency seemed to base exit and entry figures on such low survey numbers that the figures were more guestimates than statistics and wildly inaccurate.
Top 10 expat destinations
The suggestion is the agency had no idea of how many people entered and exited the country, even though they were supposed to be keeping a count.
Top 10 destinations for UK expats, with expat numbers and numbers of British state pensions in brackets are:
- Australia 1,062,000 (251,000)
- USA 829,000 (140,000)
- Spain 808,000 (104,000)
- Canada 608,000 (157,000)
- Ireland 289,000 (126,000
- France 253,000 (57,000)
- New Zealand 248,000 (54,000)
- South Africa 219,000 (38,000)
- Germany 97,000 (39,000)
- UAE 65,000 (680)
Australia has taken the top spot every year for the past two decades. The USA briefly lost out to Spain for a couple of years, but the status quo has returned.
UAE is only surprise
The newcomer is the UAE, pushing out Belgium.
Other countries that had a favourite edge during the past 20 years include Switzerland, The Netherlands and Japan.
According to the Foreign Office, around 100 countries have more than 1,000 British expats.
Putting an exact number on each country is not easy – especially as some people live and work between two or more countries and regularly move base. No one keeps a tag on these international movements.
Mainly the list is former Commonwealth countries that are English-speaking and nearby European countries that are just a short hop away for visits back to Britain to see relatives.
The government says the number of people leaving the UK to live abroad is falling. For many years, the average was around 200,000, with a peak of 210,000 in 2006 – but the number has dropped steadily since and was down to 136,000 in 2010.
Putting a number on British expats is tough – but the government reckons the count is somewhere around the 5 million mark.
From the figures given for each country the number of expats that have yet to reach the UK retirement age is substantial. Some will almost certainly qualify for a UK State Retirement Pension but I wonder how many potential pensioners realise that in 50% of the listed countries their pension will be frozen at the rate at which it first becomes payable?
In Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand – all of which are Commonwealth countries, too – and the UAE no annual increases ever. In the other five countries on the list index linked UK state pensions are payable. Totally illogical and irrational!
Pensions Minister, Steve Webb, has naively dismissed respected reports and surveys which confirm that many UK citizens are discouraged from emigrating (to be with their children or grandchildren or return to their family roots, for example) because of this frozen pension policy. If he acknowledged and acted upon these reports the potential saving – yes saving – to the UK economy by way of no NHS or other healthcare charges, no housing benefits, not bus pass, and the other supplementary benefits would be £3,700 per pensioner per year.
Steve Webb also mislead the Pension Reform Bill Scrutiny Committee and failed to correct the ignorance of some of his panel colleagues when discussing Clause 20 of that Bill. with the result that the lives of currently over half a million people and future generations are being affected by legislation that is based on – shall we be polite and use parliamentary language? – deliberate misinformation.
The campaign, lead by the International consortium of British Pensioners, for Justice, Fairness and Equality for ALL British Pensioners Abroad goes on.
Regarding the comment by Andy Robertson Fox more needs to be done in the UK to highlight the injustice of the frozen 4% of state pensioners. All are entitled to annual cost of living increases and to freeze their pensions just because of where they live is an outrageous case of blatant discrimination that has been allowed to go on for decades. These state pensioners save the UK economy millions each year, many are still UK taxpayers and have spent a lifetime working hard and where they choose to live in retirement is irrelevant, it is totally illogical that the state pensioner who retires to live in the USA gets annual cost of living increases and the retiree in Canada does not. Entitlement to a state pension is dictated by ones contributions and to not honour this is theft as well as discrimination and last time I checked both are illegal.
The government seem hell bent on hitting the pensioner much like those governments that have come before and none have addressed the frozen pension policy and you have to ask yourself why ?
How much would it cost to uprate all pensioners today ? Well , Steve Webb keeps on trying to up the figure to make it look worse than it really is – about 650 Million GBP or less than 1% of the pension budget..
What would the government gain by indexing all frozen pensioners ? Well Andy Robertson-Fox has already answered that one.
What else would be gained by doing so ? Well more pensioners would retire abroad in the knowledge that they would receive their rightful uprated pension which in turn increases that saving just mentioned and as a bonus releases housing which is what many councils need right now.
Anything else ? Well they would be seen to abandon discrimination and comply with the agreements made with the Commonwealth in the recent Charter , the OEDC, UN and I’m sure that many more could be listed.
And ? The general mistrust by the general public where pensions are concerned and rightly so with this frozen pension policy and believe it or not all future pensioners face this dilemma because it is to be continued in the current pensions bill passing through parliament just now and can be found in clause 20 which is a carbon copy of the regulation 3 which currently imposes the freezing on existing pensioners.
When will the politicians learn ? I can’t answer that one but it seems that there are not enough honest members of parliament and too many without any conscience or integrity.