The plight of Britain’s older expatriates in Spain has become sufficiently serious to have attracted a specific visit by a British government Minister in the middle of September, according to the Daily Telegraph. It remains quite to be seen how much the visit by Consular Minister, Chris Bryant, will have had, but a number of additional care workers are promised (bringing the total number of British car workers in the country to a hundred), together with a novel partnership with Age Concern.

In the depths of a global economic recession, of course, many people are having a hard time of things. For the more elderly British pensioners in Spain, of course, there are the added burdens of a plummeting exchange rate, the collapse of local property prices and an increasingly complicated and restrictive range of benefits available from the authorities back “home” in the UK (benefits to which, of course, they would have been contributing for most of their working lives). Just when they need them the most, of course, healthcare resources and their access to the services increasingly needed by the elderly have become more and more scarce, whilst the falling value of their retirement homes has left them without sufficient emergency funds on which to draw.

There remains, of course, a widespread dependence on UK benefits amongst the large expatriate community. The UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, for example, report that during the course of last year alone, more than 90,000 additional state pensions were awarded to those living in Spain. The problem, though, is that these are by no means as freely accessible than if they were actually living in Britain. The winter fuel allowance, for example, is just one of the benefits for which expatriates do not qualify, although – because they are expatriate EU citizens – they do nevertheless qualify for primary healthcare services.

The latter should be a good thing, since Spanish health facilities boast a well-earned international reputation. The problems set in after the initial treatment, however, since recovery, convalescence and general aftercare is normally down to the extended family in Spain. These are the informal sorts of support networks to which British retirees naturally have far more limited access.

With just the state pension that expatriates paid for throughout their working lives in Britain, with a state pension that is constantly undermined in value by the unfavourable exchange rates and without the ability to release any cash from the sale or mortgage of their home, the care they need in later life is obviously becoming more and more difficult. For many, of course, that will rule out expensive health insurance or residential care in the country in which they had chosen to make their retirement home. This leaves some with no option but to consider moving back to the UK where – property prices might also have recently fallen into the doldrums, but are almost certainly far more expensive than when the newly retired pensioners sold up and left.

In the meantime, the charity Age Concern says they are receiving more and more calls from elderly expatriates asking about economising, money-saving tips, while many of them rely on the financial help of friends or handouts of charity food hampers.