British service pensioners

Last week, a number of British ex-servicemen were eagerly awaiting a court sentence regarding our service pension. Unfortunately, none of the newspapers or radio stations covered this case.

When we joined the British services, one of the benefits was that on retirement we would qualify for a pension on the introduction of the two-thirds pension system.

The government then decided that we ex-servicemen would not qualify to benefit in full from the national two-thirds pension, although we paid our contributions towards the national security benefit just as everyone else does. So we lost part of our pension.

In our opinion this is unjust. We contested this in court and the judgment was not in our favour. We cannot see why our case has been turned down when:

1) The service pension we had worked for is foreign money coming into our country;

2) We pay our national insurance contributions in full but when it comes to receiving the benefits we receive a reduced pension from the department. When we complained to the local authorities we were told no one could qualify for more than one pension.

During the period when Alfred Sant was in power, the social security department had started to look into this issue and had just started to adjust this anomaly by stopping the pension deduction for a number of pensioners of a certain age.

It was intended that eventually this would be extended to all service pensioners but to make the issue more complicated the legislation was not amended accordingly. So now we have a situation where there are a few who are receiving their full pension while there are others who are still receiving a deducted pension.

Nationalist Party promises over this issue made before the general election never materialised.