It certainly does Chris, I’m dealing with my French bank now, they’ve been sending me emails to my non existent French email address, despite having my Uk one for the last 5 years, you couldn’t make it up!
I applied before I reached retirement age and it took a few months to come through by which time I’d moved back to the UK. The only issue I have is that my pension is from MSA and you cannot log on to their website from abroad which makes dealing with any issues difficult.
VPN?
.
Only option.
Interesting topic for me.
I have been receiving my french pension for about 6 years now.
Wirh our plans taking us back to the UK in the near future is there anything I need to do.
I intend to keep our French bank account open and happy to continue receiving pension in euros.
Presumably I have to advise of my new UK address, is there anything else I need to do?
Not really JB, I have to provide Info Retraite with proof of life every year but that’s now done via an app on your phone.
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That’s a lot better than the DWP proof of life, still a paper form that needs to be signed and stamped by a notaire, doctor, etc. In fact my other UK pensions also require signed bits of paper. OH says there are companies that can check all this that he uses for retirees who are in the UK or overseas, but no one I deal with is bothering to do this.
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I’m not looking forward to that particular joy in future when I eventually qualify for a state pension…
Capita, who adminster thousands of UK private pension schemes at least make this step easy. They send a hard copy letter and email inviting you to click on a link online. You click, add some very basic information, and then click submit. Done. Would that the DWP would adopt the same approach, or that mentioned above by Tim.
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Me too.
Is this new? They don’t do that with my Unilever pension - or haven’t so far.
What concerns me about the DWP paper copy (which I’m taking round to a friend’s this morning) is that the form the witness has to sign is overly complicated. I was going to take it to the Mairie (for the stamp) but realised the secretary wouldn’t cope. Hence, to my French friend who is a retired English teacher.
I also resent the imposition of a list of who might sign - a witness is a witness. We have friends who were engineers before retirement, why can’t they sign?
I’ve had to go to some lengths to get suitable witnesses in my time. To get my husband’s first Irish passport, I joined the local Anglican church so the English-speaking minister with a landline phone could field a call from the Irish passport office.
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The old British “rules” about professions only being able to witness documents needs to be updated. It’ll cost money to get a solicitor to witness, a GP is not readily accessible, how many of us know a teacher once we’ve retired or moved to a different area, few people attend places of worship, and with online banking it may require a journey of some distance to find a branch of one’s bank and someone willing to provide the signature and stamp.
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I’ve had documents witnessed about 10 times by notaires and I’ve never paid.
My mairie has a big file in which the secretary puts a photocopy of these signed documents for record so they obviously have no problem doing this for the locals and did mine with no hesitation.
I’ve received an online message from l’Assurance Retrait saying :
Votre demande est en cours de traitement
Délai moyen : 3 mois et demi
They also asked me to complete form 2010a, confirming I declare my income to the tax administration of my country of residence. I did this and posted it back to Carsat Normandie. Would have been a lot easier if could have signed online, but I hope in future they change this.
So it looks as though things are moving forwards … I turned 67 last September so by rights I should be receiving it by now.
Zero, did you have to provide old payslips when you claimed your French pension? I had read somewhere that you do. But according to my current employer, as long as info.retraite has a record of the periods concerned, they don’t ask for payslips.
For what it’s worth, five or six years ago I claimed my French pension (from working here in the the early eighties) with basically nothing except my social security number 
Now, the pension is only worth buttons but getting is kept me occupied for a while. It took a bit of effort but it all worked out in the end.
That’s great, thanks John. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet about having to have ALL your payslips but my employer assures me this is nonsense and that you would only need them if you wanted to show that periods were missing. Info.retraite appears to have a full record in our case. Including for jobs we’d completely forgotten about.
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Helen,
I did send them about 5 years ago, but they never confirmed they received them, and haven’t mentioned since. I’ve checked on l’assuranceretrait and all my work record is listed, so seems ok,
Don’t know if they used my payslips to complete my work record. I suspect all they use the info associated with my social security number.
Thanks Zero. From info.retraite I can see they already have a full record. So hopefully there will be no reason for them to request payslips.