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Labour MP for Islington South and Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry has published an article for Politics Home in which she calls for greater pensions freedoms for public sector workers.*

Written as part of her failed leadership campaign, the article named five major policy areas she felt the party needs to address in the future: climate crisis, the NHS, Social Care, affordable housing, and pensions.

In fact, the article was largely concerned with the issue of public sector pensions as Ms Thornberry warned that the country faced a “ticking time-bomb” in respect of the sums which will become payable in future decades. She quoted a 2017 estimate which suggested that public sector pension liabilities had a £1.7 trillion shortfall. She said that the public currently spends around £40 billion a year meeting this gap.

Following on from last week’s blog on pension passporting, written by Rosemary Sheppard, Blacktower IFA in France, The Independent newspaper has now warned that British expats abroad could have their cash flow placed in peril by a no-deal Brexit.

While the talks around Brexit and expat pensions are certainly newsworthy, the reporting of pension payments becoming “illegal”, as stated in The Independent’s headline, is pretty implausible.

The story, published on July 25 2018, said the Association of British Insurers (ABI) had told parliament’s Exiting the European Union select committee of the “plausible” risk that payments from British bank accounts could become unviable.