Hi Everyone,

i have some questions on state pension for poles- any help appreciated

thanks in advance:

What is the minimum time you have to work in the UK to qualify for a state Pension?

Are the contributions you make while working in the UK transferable towards your pension in Poland, if a Polish worker decides to return to Poland? How it would be assessed and paid: at the British or Polish level of payments?

Are the contributions you made while working in Poland transferable towards your pension in the UK? How it would be assessed and paid: at the British or Polish level of payments?

What about housewives – do they qualify for a pension? What do they have to do to qualify? If child benefit is in their name, does it count towards their pension?

The rules about calculating state pension payable in the UK for migrant workers are quite incredibly complicated. The only time I worked one out it went something like this.

1. You need a statement of the number of qualifying years for each Member State in which the claimant has been insured. This may need translating before it means anything to you (the one I saw was in Greek).
2. You add up the number of years in total in which the claimant has been in insurance anywhere in the EU.
3. You work out how much pension they would get in the country in which the pension is being claimed if all those years had been under that country's pension scheme, at that point taking into account any years covered by things such as Home Responsibilities protection (which applied in the case I saw, but the country of claim was GB).
4. You then calculate what percentage of their number of years as at 2 they have spent in insurance in the country of claim, and they will get that percentage of the total pension calculated at 3.

Any other country in which the claimant has been insured will carry out the same calculation and pay on the same basis, so you can end up getting payments of small amounts from as many countries as you ahve worked in (though periods of less than a year are disregarded).

The basics are in article 46 of Recgulation EEC 1408/71, and if you have accesss to the green volume of the Sweet and Maxwell legislation anthologies, there is a good explanation with illustrations of how it might work.