Expats & Brexit

With continued debate on the possibility of the UK withdrawing from the EU (known as brexit) here are a few thoughts on the ramifications on the effect of expat state pensioners and their dependents living in the EU... and how the UK could be "biting it's nose off to spite it's face".

The big UKIP-driven debate about immigrants "coming over here, stealing our jobs and taking our benefits" (a juxtaposition if ever I heard one!) is certainly causing the Tory element of the coalition to panic like a herd of gazelle into an abyss... and at no point has anyone at the top of government paid consideration to the 2+ million British expats residing in other EU countries.

So instead of worrying about "Johnny Foreigner" let's take a reasoned look at the effects of a brexit on your granddads and grannies... who may well be looking to take up resident in your spare bedroom after 2017!

Currently, expat British state pensioners and their dependents are entitled to receive their state pension (NOT a welfare benefit¹) and "exportable" benefits if they have a sufficient link to the UK. The DWP do not actually provide their calculations for the sufficient link eligibility, but those that have the right to receive a state pension due to reaching the qualifying years of national insurance payments (nowadays only a mere 30 qualifying years) are generally deemed eligible... a seemingly one-sided criteria given that the children of migrants living outside the UK are currently entitled to receive Child Benefit, but I will not go down the route of that argument here.

The main exportable benefits received by OAP British expats in the EU are DLA (care component only, not mobility²) or Attendance Allowance and Carers Allowance.

Before any critics jump on this bandwagon and correct me on this, I know that there are limited additional benefits that can be claimed by work-age expats, i.e. JSA for the first 6 months you are abroad and seeking work, but this article is dealing specifically with OAPs who have been living in the EU for several years and their dependents who will no longer be eligible for any short-term UK benefits.

As has been widely reported, Winter Fuel Payments for OAP expats are being removed in 2015 (legislation due to conveniently occur just BEFORE the General Election) from a selection of EU countries³, based on annual average temperatures. However, it should be noted, particularly by those UKIP supporters gleefully clapping their hands at this news in the UK, that due to the manipulation of temperature statistics by the DWP, while OAP expats in "hot" France will lose their WFP, the Tories have ensured – for reasons known only to IDS – that those in "cold" Italy will retain the payment!

And, as an aside, for anyone interested in the workings of the EU and “benefits”, the European Commission has decreed that WFP is part of an OAP's state pension and, as such, it is illegal to remove this element from being paid. Needless to say, if the Tories regain power and this legislation remains in place, and the UK population vote to stay IN the EU, then this will be subject to a legal challenge that will be dragged for years through the European Court of Justice, at a substantial cost to the taxpayer that will probably outweigh the cost of actually paying it.

To give an idea of how the UK government likes to decry the ECJ and then use it for its own twisted means against its disabled citizens, for example, just Google ECJ cases C-299/05 and C-537/09. The latter is a wonderful wake-up call for those who think Cameron's crocodile tears for his son are real. He really does not give a flying f*ck about the disabled.

Anyway, let's move on to healthcare and the NHS – a big talking point at the time of writing this blog, as Gideon has announced a £2bn boost to the ailing UK service. Unlike the UK, most other EU countries do not provide services "free at the point of delivery", so along with the indigenous populations, even UK state pensioners are obliged to have some form of private insurance as the reciprocal agreements within the EU do not cover 100% of the costs.

For example, in France, payments for GP and specialist visits are made upfront: €23 for a GP visit, €44 (average) for a specialist. Hospital stays will be invoiced for payment by cheque/card or be covered by insurance. Prescription charges must also be covered otherwise payment is required.

Thinking about this, it might make those living in Britain a bit more mindful about making appointments that they then fail to attend if the UK adopted this policy. But given that the UK does not even charge other EU migrants to access NHS services, could this be seen as another failed opportunity that has been perpetuated by consecutive UK governments?

OK, Cameron & Co are now talking the talk about ensuring NHS charges are made by “foreigners” and that benefit entitlements are tightened up, but this smacks of closing the gate after the horse has bolted... particularly as the benefit changes being proposed are already de rigour in some EU countries in that you do not get anything out of the system without first paying a hefty amount in!

Anyway, in the event of Britain leaving the EU and repatriating "foreigners", there is no reason why the British expat's host country cannot do the same. Even if there is no tit-for-tat reprisals, there is no doubt in the current climate, that the UK government will seek to punish expats who remain abroad by freezing state pensions, as they do already for those in Canada, Australia etc, and removing their rights to exportable benefits, which are currently protected under EU law.

If this is the case, then many of those living on a basic state pension will find themselves forced to return to the UK, so let's have a look at what could entail:

Firstly, it should be noted that back in the days of the Colonial Empire – those days currently being sought to be relived by our UKIP pals – the British expatriate was, no doubt, a moneyed individual with no reliance on state assistance. The stereotypical expat, foisted upon a naïve UK population by the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express, is one who sits around a pool all day, in brilliant sunshine, quaffing champagne. Sadly, my friends, those expats are a rare breed and for those dinosaurs that still exist, they most certainly will not be worrying about what is going on back in the homeland.

Instead many of the expat communities, those living particularly in Spain, France and Portugal, are of the post-war (baby boomer) generation of hard grafters who had the opportunity to buy their council properties in the UK while working. Then, when it was time to put their feet up, having paid into the NI system for a minimum of 44 years to get their pittance of a State Pension (and for those fortunate enough, a small public or private pension), took the chance to cash in the fruits of their labour and buy a retirement flat, finca or derelict farmhouse in foreign climes.

Following the global crash and like many ordinary folk in Blighty, many of these expats have seen their retirement abodes become worthless and their state pension reduce by a weakened pound (and in my opinion an artificially inflated euro!). Belt-tightening has been the order of the day, just like everyone else.

At this point, I also need to point out – having been confronted on the issue of expats being able to sell up and bring their “fortune” back home to Blighty and invest in the housing market there – that some expats left rented property in the UK to rent in their host country, and therefore have no “assets” to sell up in the event of a return... so one can only hope that the UK government has the necessary resources in place to house these OAPs, particularly if adapted properties are needed!

Either way, as I write this, it would appear that a return to the UK is seeming more attractive. After all, OAP expats would find themselves entitled to receive the following, thank you very much:

State Pension

Pension Credit

Winter Fuel Payment

Cold Weather Payments

Housing Benefit

Council Tax reduction

DLA Care & Mobility components

Attendance Allowance

Carers Allowance

Free NHS healthcare

Free prescriptions

While any work-age dependents may be able to additionally claim:

JSA

Income support

Incapacity benefit/ESA

Mmm... now this is increasingly becoming very interesting isn't it?

Maybe this brexit thing won't be too bad, eh, for us old muppets if we troop back to Blighty?

All those extra benefits that we currently waiver in favour of our expat “lifestyle”, which in many cases is nothing different from the “lifestyle” we'd be living back home.

Makes you think, doesn't it? Grass, greener, other side of the fence... and such.

Oh, but wait? If the UK throws out the working EU migrants who are currently paying into the system that allows continued payments of State Pension to us and, hopefully, the generations coming along behind, where exactly does that leave us all?

Time to step back from the brexit precipice and reflect, maybe?

1. State Pension: it is a grotesque effrontery to common-sense that IDS and Gideon have bundled the State Pension into the benefit/welfare pot, as those in receipt of SP have earned the right to receive this money after years of national insurance contributions.

2. DLA Mobility component: it should be noted that if anyone living in the UK with restricted mobility, or even wheelchair-bound, is thinking of moving to another EU country, that following a long drawn out legal case through the European Court of Justice using taxpayers money, the UK Government (Labour and then the current coalition) decreed that DLA Mobility is NOT an exportable benefit (ECJ case C-537/09). So presumably you can arise like Lazarus and throw away your mobility aids the minute you leave Blighty's shores!

3. Winter fuel payments will no longer be available to OAP expats living in: Cyprus, France, Gibraltar, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Spain. Note that Italy is not excluded and expats there will continue to receive WFP. To ensure that expats in France have their WFP removed from 2015, IDS and the DWP included France's 5 overseas tropical departments in the provided dataset – Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Réunion, and French Guiana – where only 30 retired Brits live, but this allows denial of WFP to those living in the colder climes of mainland France where temperatures in the winter fall to MINUS 15 degrees celcius! If IDS can do it there he can do it in the UK, so Cornwall, Devon and Dorset beware!

Not that stupid, Dave

Conservative party chairman Grant Shapp's announcement yesterday raised a wry eyebrow, but definitely not a smile, in our household. Well used to seeing the party politicking on every media outlet before any relevant vote - in this case the 2015 General Election - like many expats I am too long in the tooth to take much notice of any of the promises being made in order to gain my vote. Naturally, this story has already prompted the inevitable raft of comments on social media spewing out the same old rhetoric... "they've abandoned the UK, why should they have a say?" being the most repeated. And were it not for the fact that I have been an expat for the past eight years, I confess that I would probably be asking the same question. 

Instead, I can answer that question quite plainly: many expats continue to pay taxes and NI contributions to the UK, or have a "sufficient link" (UK Gov speak!) by way of receipt of State Pension. But after 15 years, despite the Treasury still collecting these funds, the British expat is totally cut off from having any say in the governmental issues of their homeland.

This is in complete opposition to most (but admittedly not all) other European countries, i.e. France who provides voting facilities in the UK for their nationals living and working there. Even those countries further afield, i.e. the USA, have a voting provision for their expats living in the UK. And no, British expats living in other EU countries do not have the right to vote in the general elections of their residential country!

Also, for the 3.3 million vote-eligible British expats worldwide, the UK system is deliberately complicated and antiquated - something that ensures that only a few thousand die-hards are ever registered to vote. It would seem, however, that there is change in the air, with some recent improvements made for registering online and the Electoral Commission, led by HoC Speaker John Bercow, seeking for an electronic, online system that could not only appeal to British expats around the world, but possibly engage younger voters in the UK.


However, even after explaining this to some, the argument still rings out that expats have cut their ties with their homeland. On the contrary, most expats maintain a very close-knit relationship with their homeland through strong family bonds, regular visits and financial ties.

Something that it is difficult for many UK residents to recognise, is that being an expat is no longer the exclusive domain of the rich. Any one of you reading this could become an expat. We are expats. We live less than an hour from the UK. We do not live in a chateau. We have not been blessed with a Lottery win (yet!). It was simply something we chose to do after 40 years of hard graft and dues paid. Time for a quiet life. Oh how we wish. Instead we are the minority group that, if targeted in such a fashion in the UK, would see the headlines screaming out accusations of us being the victims of discrimination, racism, sexism... you name it. But no, we are expats... turncoats of the worse kind (*irony*).

Anyway, that is our life example, but many British citizens of a younger, working age may head off for a few years, then return to retire back in the UK - but will be disenfranchised as a voter if their career keeps them away for over 15 years. Pensioners, who have retired for a quiet life in another European country, receive their State Pensions - and there are some green-eyed monsters living in the UK that say even this is wrong. That if you do not live in the UK, you should have no right to a State Pension. So should we do that to all the OAPs who have left their county's of birth or work and headed to Cornwall for their retirement?

Even those expats not quite old enough to draw pensions continue to pay their dibs to the UK Treasury coffers, in the form of National Insurance Contributions. After all, British expats have no right to draw a pension in their country of residence if they have never worked there. Would you agree to immigrants arriving straight off the boat and claiming a British State Pension? No, of course not. So we do not expect the French/Spanish/Italian/etc governments to supplement ours.

Then there are those British citizens who have spent their working lives serving the British public, in our schools, hospitals, emergency services and Armed Forces, who receive their pensions, as rightly so for the contributions made. These pensions, unlike the State Pension, are only taxable in the UK. For that THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO CHOICE.

So, many expats have paid into the UK coffers all their working lives, some continue to pay NI contributions, others are still liable for Income Tax on their public pensions... and after 15 years... NO VOTE, NO VOICE, NO REPRESENTATION

So, if you have got to this point and are asking why I am denigrating the Conservative party's offer to lift this restriction, I will tell you why (hold onto your hats):

Firstly, I believe that David Cameron is only making this proviso to garner the votes of existing eligible expats (like us - still eligible to vote in General Elections until 2021) to get his party into power next year. As we all know, politicians will say ANYTHING to get a vote... note, Clegg and the tuition fee debacle. And why wait until after the May 2015 election? Why not now? The Lib Dems have already made this promise and, in all likelihood, even some Labour MPs would support the cause.

Secondly, the same political party offering this to expats have already announced their intention to remove the right of British expat pensioners living in the EU to receive the Winter Fuel Payment from 2015... after they sweep to power on our proposed votes! This is despite Cameron's 2010 pledge that his party would never take away this benefit from State Pensioners (and he did not specify only UK SPs!). Okay, another contentious issue that many will decry with "but they all live in the sunshine, they don't need money for heating" - an argument backed up every year with a particularly spiteful and malicious Mac cartoon depicting rich expats using their payment for stocking up their booze supply. Oh how I wish that were true.

Yes, the Mediterranean countries do have temperate winters, I am not going to argue with anyone on that matter. But what I have taken extreme exception to is Iain Duncan Smith's skewed and deliberately manipulated average annual temperature dataset, whereby he claims that France is HOTTER than Italy... is intending to retain the winter fuel payment for expats in Italy... and used a particularly sleekit (Scottish word meaning sly, crafty) method of comparing said annual average temperatures with the south-west of England (the thermometer, excuse the pun, for deciding who is eligible to receive WFP) - by including the French overseas departments (DOMS)... all based in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean where only a handful of OAP British expats live!

Thirdly, and I am going back in time a bit here, so bear with me. In 1992 the then-Conservative government, in conjunction with complying with EU social security rules, had to decide which UK-based benefits could be exportable if eligible British citizens moved to live in another EU country under Freedom of Movement. They chose to place Disability Living Allowance - care and mobility elements - along with Attendance Allowance and Carers Allowance in the "basket" as non-exportable. Now I am not going to bore anyone with the legal ramifications, but after a protracted, expensive (to the UK tax payer) legal case, the European Court of Justice decided, in 2007, that DLA (care element only), AA and CA WERE EXPORTABLE and should be paid to any eligible British citizen who had had those benefits removed when moving to another EU country.

However, even today the UK Government is still spending tax payers money (and remember, expats are tax payers too) in its attempts not to reimburse owed monies to some eligible claimants. The UK Government (under Labour in it's dying days of 2010) did finally accept the European Court of Justice ruling, but the current coalition government continues to procrastinate - and defend at great cost - certain legal challenges, including, in 2011, that of maintaining the DLA mobility element as non-exportable by taking the case successfully to the European Court of Justice again, using tax payers money.

So presumably (and, yes I am being sarcastic here) any disabled, wheelchair-bound British citizen, will be able to throw away their wheels and walk the minute they land on the shores of another EU country. I don't think so, Mr Cameron. And I don't think, despite your own family sufferings, that you have ANY idea of the difficulties of living with disability if you can allow IDS to be so ferocious in his attack on that particular group of people, both at home and abroad. Oh but wait, it's okay to send all that Child Benefit out of the country to children who have never lived in the UK and whose parents have barely made a fingernail dent in the contributions they have paid into your coffers!

Finally - yes, you can breath a sigh of relief now - in the HoC debate on the EU in/out referendum, support was given to the British expat by several MPs, including Mike Gapes, Labour, Ilford South, who proposed an amendment for British expats to be allowed to vote in the proposed 2017 referendum. After all, a withdrawal from the EU will affect us all. Mr. Gapes' amendments were not called to a division. So, unlike our counterparts living in the "UK State" of Gibraltar, no vote for the EU-resident British expat in a referendum that could see the withdrawal of our rights to healthcare, frozen State Pensions, requirements for residential permits, no right to exportable benefits, non-acceptance of educational and professional qualifications... the list goes on.

There is no doubt the Conservatives are terrified of the UKIP momentum and are seeking any way they can to ensure that the removal van is not needed at Number 10 in May 2015.  

USING EXPATS AS A POLITICAL PAWN IS NOT ONLY CYNICAL, IT IS DOWNRIGHT OFFENSIVE.

UKIP want to raise the UK drawbridge. If the Conservatives continue to play their nasty game, they'd better be prepared to roll out a red carpet across that drawbridge and welcome their expats home. I just hope that their plans include the necessary funding for housing, benefits, NHS facilities, etc, for our return.


Links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/11068438/Tories-pledge-to-give-vote-back-to-all-expats.html
http://uklibdems.eu/en/article/2013/684052/we-want-our-votes-back
http://www.connexionfrance.com/news_articles.php?id=5217
http://www.connexionfrance.com/expat-wins-care-benefit-appeal-10343-news-article.html
http://www.thisfrenchlife.com/deuxsevres/2013/11/european-inout-referendum-gibraltar-in-the-rest-of-us-out.html

Referendums & the disenfranchised expat

With less than three weeks to go before Scotland makes its referendum decision on whether to split from the rest of the UK, there continues to be a lot of rhetoric, spin and, quite frankly, downright lies relating to how things will be in a post referendum "Yes" society.

Of course, the exact same pedalling of dodgy arguments and scaremongering (but hopefully not the thuggish threats) is to be expected if Cameron gets his wish for an in/out referendum on the divisive issue of membership of the EU in 2017.

But in amongst all this argy bargy, to-ing and fro-ing of debate and argument, the one group of British citizens that are going be most affected by "Yes" and "out" wins from these referendums is the expat currently living another EU country, thanks to the rights of freedom of movement.

So what if Scotland leaves the UK and/or the UK leaves the EU? What difference would it make?

Well I'm not going to argue the ins and outs of the Scottish/EU membership issue here. Anyone who wants to know how that particular piece of legislation works needs only to read the article:

Independent Scotland will have a long way to go for EU status, European Parliament policy adviser @Ben_Acheson blogs http://t.co/zifhH0cV4I

Instead it is worth considering the effects on those currently living in the EU and how easy it will be to deny the opportunities of those who might wish to broaden their horizons by coming to work and/or retire in another Member State. For example:

As non-EU citizens do not have the automatic right to live and work in EU countries, as "foreigners" Scottish/UK citizens would need to apply for fixed term residential permits.

Scottish/UK state pensioners would no longer have the automatic right to use  healthcare systems in EU countries using the S1 form.

They could also have their State Pension frozen, as is currently applicable to SPs living outside the EU.

The European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) would longer be valid for Scottish/UK citizens traveling within the EU.

UK "exportable" benefits, such as Disability Living Allowance (care element, not mobility proportion as that already prohibited under EU law) would not permissible.

UK educational and professional qualifications may not be accepted by countries within the EU, as EU mutual recognition rules would longer apply.

Naturally, I will presume that some readers will immediately jump on the stereotypical expat bandwagon and point out how we have "abandoned" our homeland to partake in supping sangria in the sun.

So this point I would like you to take a step back.

Reflect on how you would feel today if you were told by your government that they will continue to take your taxes and NI contributions... but you will have ABSOLUTELY NO SAY WHATSOEVER in a referendum that will affect the rest of your life. Or, indeed, after 15 years, no voting rights at all.

Or that you are in your twilight years, having worked and paid your contributions for over 40 years, retired on a basic State Pension to a small apartment/cottage in a quiet corner of another EU country, subsidising your medical costs (as unlike UK medical care is not FREE at the point of delivery) and living frugally during these times of austerity... and you then find all your rights have been taken away, with no available facility make your voice heard.

No vote, no voice, no representation... just pay your dues, thank you.

Welcome to the world of the British expat.

The solution?

Better think about getting that welcome mat out at the White Cliffs of Dover...