Overseas Service Pensioners

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:12 pm on 22 January 2003.

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Photo of Tim Boswell Tim Boswell Shadow Spokesperson (Business, Innovation and Skills), Shadow Spokesperson (Work and Pensions) 7:12, 22 January 2003

I very much agree. I have at least one constituent who is in that situation. All those people have lost out badly, and the Minister may want to clarify their situation when she responds to my remarks.

The important principle underlying the concern of anyone who attends this debate should be that, as far as possible, those who have served the Crown in whatever capacity should be treated equitably. It remains incumbent on Ministers to identify, monitor and iron out any anomalies wherever possible.

OSPA, the representative association of these pensioners, was founded in 1960. As it says in its briefing, since then,

"successive Governments, slowly and usually reluctantly, have conceded that . . . members should not be treated worse than their counterparts in the two UK services", by which it means the home civil service and the diplomatic service. It refers to a number of advances that its pressure, and that applied by the House, has helped to secure.

Those include the extension of indexation to colonial pensioners in the 1960s, the Overseas Pensions Act 1973, which allowed for the central takeover of such pensions to ensure their continuing payment, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, important concessions to war service credit. Most recently, in 1996, the Government agreed to a special safeguard scheme for colonial pensioners who had served in Hong Kong. I shall refer to that service in a minute.

OSPA believes, and in this it goes along with modern good pension practice, that the position of widows and dependants in the various schemes should also be fairly aligned. It says that

"the most glaring case of inequality at present is that of post-retirement marriages."

That brings me squarely to the case of my constituent, Mr. Hodson. His first marriage ended in divorce, but many years ago. He remarried 14 years ago, and has one young daughter of that marriage. Understandably, as he is now in his 60s, he is anxious to safeguard his family's position.

Under present arrangements, as Mr. Hodson's remarriage took place after his retirement, his pension will die with him. What he finds particularly galling is that although he saw many years of service with the colonial police, first in Uganda, then Fiji and finally Hong Kong, he knows of cases in which the widows of other colonial servants in Hong Kong are receiving a discretionary pension from the Chinese authorities, even though the remarriage was also post-retirement.

Leaving aside the oddity of a communist Chinese regime being more generous to former servants of the Crown than Ministers of the Crown, there are important anomalies in the treatment of home civil servants. A concern for those civil servants and their unions is the fact that in introducing the new principal civil service pension scheme in 2000, the Government decided not to make any change to the rule added to the old scheme in 1978, but without retrospective effect, thus allowing pensions for widows of post-retirement marriages for service after April 1978 only. There is therefore discrimination between the oldest and often neediest pensioners in various Crown pensions and people with later service.

Another anomaly, which bears directly on Mr. Hodson's case, is that the 1978 decision was applicable only to civil servants, not colonial servants. However, Mr. Hodson, unlike a large number of colonial servants, was still in service in Hong Kong at that time, as the colony was our main outstanding colonial commitment, although officers may have been serving in the Gilbert and Ellice islands—I use the colonial name—the Solomon islands, the New Hebrides and British Honduras, which did not achieve independence until just after 1978. The old colonial pension schemes had a different funding basis from the home scheme, but I cannot help but agree with OSPA, which says that

"denial to the few officers still then serving in these territories and who subsequently became married after their retirement of treatment given to their home counterparts is hard to defend".

Although data are scarce, any contingent liability for such cases would not amount to more than a tiny fraction of the departmental budget.