They dreamed of an idyllic life in the sun. But thousands of expat Britons hit by the falling pound are caught in a terrible trap...
Climbing out of the
cockpit of his Spitfire after completing his final mission as an ace World War II fighter pilot, Ian Ross made a solemn promise to himself. Having cheated death countless times - on one occasion staging a dramatic
last-ditch landing with black smoke
billowing from a
shattered wing - he
swore that he would
cherish every day of life as a civilian and never worry about anything again.
To the young RAF Flight Lieutenant, that simple philosophy seemed the most
fitting way to honour the many comrades he had seen killed, and for 64 years he managed to adhere to it.
This week, however, at his retirement home on the Costa del Sol - a small,
sparsely-furnished second-floor flat near Marbella, which vibrates to the traffic
streaming incessantly along the nearby main road - Mr Ross confessed that his wartime resolution is being tested to breaking point.
For like tens of thousands of expats who left Britain in search of the Spanish dream, this 94-year-old war hero is facing an enemy so pernicious that even he can see no way of defeating it.
In the UK we face
spiralling national debt,
plunging house prices, sky-rocketing unemployment and the return of 50 per cent income tax - but for the British expats on the Costas the situation is even worse.
The Spanish economy is predicted to
shrink by 3 per cent this year and one in five people is expected to be out of work - twice the EU average. Home repossessions have doubled, bankruptcies
soared, and the bottom is fast falling out of the tourism industry.
All this means that the recession is bad enough for the Spanish nationals, yet, as I discovered this week, when visiting many
embattled expat communities on the Costa del Sol, for a rapidly increasing number of the estimated 750,000 Britons who live in Spain it has become a
fullblown catastrophe.
The broad reasons are well-documented. Barely six months ago, £1 bought about €1.4, but with the exchange rate now at virtual parity, the private and state pensions on which many expats depend - and which are paid in sterling - have lost almost one-third of their value.
At the same time, interest rates on their investments have fallen from around 6.5 to 1.5 per cent. To compound their problems, many are tied into long-term Spanish mortgages at much higher fixed rates, so they are not benefiting from falling interest rates.
For many, this seismic shift in their financial circumstances has left them so
broke that the Spanish Dream has turned into a nightmare.
Even such essentials as paying the rent or mortgage and clothing and feeding their families are beyond them, and they are being forced to sell
heirlooms and
trinkets at
car-boot sales and to second-hand gold dealers (one of the few new boom businesses).
As if their
plight was not serious enough, in recent weeks the situation for many expats has worsened dramatically. With the property market in
freefall, they are finding themselves trapped.
There are now an estimated one million surplus homes on the conspicuously over-concreted costas, many of them purpose-built for the British market, but estate agents are closing down all along the coast.
And as the only buyers are speculators making audaciously low offers (50 per cent of the asking price is not untypical), the villas and apartments expats bought for optimum prices during the recent property boom - in the belief their value could only go up - have become virtually un-sellable.
So, even if they want to start afresh in rainy old Britain, they can't - or at least not without losing their entire outlay. An increasing number are so desperate, though, that they are doing just that; handing back the keys to banks and mortgage companies, packing up and flying home.
Since the British community in Spain is so vast and diverse, the casualties span the social spectrum, and, of course, some cases are clearly more deserving of our sympathy than others.
In the upmarket Marbella suburb of Nuevo Andalucia, stamping ground of Premier League footballers and soap stars, I met Stan Cornell, a
roguishly charming property speculator from Slough, Bucks, who still dances and drinks till dawn at 62 years of age and describes himself as 'a bit of a playboy'.
A couple of years ago, the entrepreneur
snapped up a fabulous threestorey villa built with wrap-around views encompassing Gibraltar and the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, intending to
gut and
revamp it and sell it for a handsome profit.
Mr Cornell paid €900,000 (£640,000) for the then-desirable property and has spent a further £300,000 on it so far. Only a few months ago he could have expected it to
fetch about £2 million when it was finished, turning a profit of more than a million.
But the mortgage alone is costing around £90,000 a year to service, and, with a buyer nowhere in sight, the property is
'bleeding me dry', he says. He is so desperate to get rid of it that he would gladly drop the price by a million and
write off his losses.
'I've lost everything in recessions before, so I'm not quite on the little green and black pills yet,' he joked. 'But at this rate you never know.
'The one thing I won't do is go home. You can't behave like a teenager in your 60s in Britain, but you can in Marbella. And anyway, in the pubs at home my girlfriend couldn't dance on the tables.'
If our hearts don't exactly bleed for characters like Mr Cornell, who are
in it for a fast buck and know the risks, one finds all too many genuinely sad stories; and surely none more so than that of former Spitfire pilot Mr Ross.
An Ulsterman, he returned to County Antrim after the war, where he married happily and
carved out a career as an auctioneer.
When he retired, during the early Eighties, he and his wife, Maureen, who had no children, moved to a golf course villa in Spain, living modestly but comfortably on his state and RAF pensions, together worth about £13,000 a year.
His wife died from cancer 15 years ago, whereupon he moved to a smaller home and stoically
set about making the most of the life that had been denied to so many of his generation.
Even at his advanced age, and suffering from arthritis, he still shops, cooks and cleans for himself, swims twice daily, and stays mentally alert by doing Sudoku puzzles. The problem is that at 94 he knows he cannot remain self-sufficient indefinitely and will soon need to be cared for professionally.
'Until a few months ago, I had made plans for what I would do when things reached that stage,' Mr Ross told me, sitting in the communal garden at his apartment complex on a beautiful April morning.
'As I have no family in Northern Ireland now and virtually all my friends are here, I thought I'd move into the old people's home at the end of my street. It's very pleasant there, and there are all different nationalities - English, Swedes, Americans - so even though I don't speak much Spanish I'd have plenty of company.
'But I've looked into this carefully, and because my pensions are paid into my bank in sterling, and the pound has fallen so badly, I won't be able to afford the home's £500-a-week fees.
'The only way I'll be able to manage is by going into a home in Belfast and I'm
dreading that.
'Spain is my home now and I feel quite apprehensive about the prospect of having to go back to a strange place. I think that, and the miserable British weather, might just do for me.'
Unlike many Britons
caught up in this mess, Mr Ross, who has all but given up his little luxuries, pities himself not at all. 'It's just how things are,' he says resolutely. He smiles and adds: 'My mistake was that I never expected to live this long. If I had known, I'd have put a bit more money by to provide for myself. It's all a bit unfortunate.'
This is something of an understatement. The situation is also 'a bit unfortunate' for thousands of others, among them Andrew Anderson, president of the Marbella-based British Association.
Mr Anderson is in a reverse bind to Mr Ross. His pensions have also sharply declined in value - but he is keen to return to his native Dunfermline. With Se Vende (For Sale) signs
sprouting up all over the area, however, the 73-year-old architect knows he has little hope of selling his apartment unless he
slashes the €225,000 (£205,000) asking price.
Thus, at a time when he would like to be
roaming the Scottish
heather with his new Trinidadian wife, he is trapped. 'With climate change, even the weather here is not as good as it was,' he said
ruefully. 'Now it rains in summer.'
The picture grows more depressing still when you drive 40 minutes along the coast to the cheap-and-cheerful British enclave of Fuengirola, with its
brash, football-themed bars, and cafes serving English pub grub.
Strolling along 'Fish Alley', a gourmet thoroughfare for British
stodge and lager
guzzlers, it soon became clear that the
glutinous gravy-train has
well and truly hit the buffers.
Usually by late April, the canopied terraces would be filling up with the Union Jack shorts brigade; but on Tuesday afternoon, with the thermometer
tipping 72 degrees, they were
eerily deserted.
Indeed, a good many British landlords have thrown in the towel and gone home. Among those still struggling on
gamely, I found former London publican Fred Hill and his wife Anne, who paid about £65,000 for the
lease to Friar Tuck's restaurant almost three years ago.
Like most of his rivals, he is attempting to
lure customers with
cut-price meals. 'This is the REAL deal,' reads his latest sign. 'Fresh Icelandic fish, fresh chips and mushy peas - only €7.50.'
Since imported fish prices have risen five times since he took over, one wonders how he does it.
'Business was fantastic at first,' said Mr Hill mournfully. 'We only needed to open from 6pm till 10.30pm, and we would get 90 customers. Now we open for 13 hours a day, and we're lucky if we get 30.
'I know two people who've just locked up and gone, losing everything they invested - tens of thousands of pounds. But we haven't quite reached that stage yet. Besides, there's nothing to go home to, is there?'
Sadly, the experiences of those who have returned to Britain suggest he is right, and not only because there are so few job opportunities and the economy lies in ruins.
Although the Spanish welfare system is far less generous than ours,
affording scant protection to incomers who lose their jobs or fall on hard times, unemployed expats actually often find themselves worse off when they come back home.
What they fail to realise is that, by switching their residency to Spain, they have
forfeited the right to claim UK benefits. Before they can do so, they must go through a laborious reregistration process which can take months. They must do the same to become eligible for NHS treatment.
'It can often be very difficult for those who go home because they find that the UK is not the great benefactor people seem to think,' says Tony Aldous, of Age Concern in Estepona, near Malaga. 'There should be a cross-border arrangement whereby benefits are transferable, but that is a long way off.'
Among those to have discovered
the harsh truth are Suzanne Carmichael, 38, and her partner Carl Butler, who were forced back to Britain recently with their children, Zoe, 11, and Luis, two. Five years ago they sold their townhouse in Rochester, Kent, for £229,000 and took out a
whopping €795,000 mortgage (£709,000 at today's exchange rate) to buy the home of their dreams: a white, Moorish castle-style villa with
sumptuous views of the Mijas costa.
When times were good, they had no problem meeting their €3,000 (£2,500) a month repayments. But when their fixed interest rate ended, sending the monthly instalments
soaring to €4,700 (£4,200), and they lost their jobs - she as a software company executive and he in construction - they couldn't manage.
Falling on the kindness of Mr Butler's mother, who offered to put them up at her home in Chatham, Kent, at the end of January, they gave back their keys (in an arrangement which at least preserved their credit rating) and flew home.
Almost three months later, the family who once dined nightly on a starlit terrace scented with bougainvillea, and spent idyllic weekends picnicking on the playa, are still
humble lodgers.
'Coming back has been quite an eye-opener,' says Ms Carmichael. 'The first shock came when we were told that our UK passports and the fact we were born here meant absolutely nothing. The woman at Jobseekers even said to us: "Can you not just go back to Spain?"
'Since we got back, all we've had to live on is the £90-a-week Jobseekers allowance. The system is so severely under strain with the number of new people on housing benefit that we are still waiting for our claim to go through. Our child benefit forms haven't been processed yet, either.
'Another thing we have found is that people have such a negative attitude towards us. I class myself as very intelligent and hard-working, but because we have to claim benefits, through no fault of our own, we are treated as
scum.
'That's very hard to take, particularly when you walk down Chatham High Street and see how standards of behaviour have deteriorated here since we left for Spain five years ago.'
Even after all they have been through, the family haven't given up on their Mediterranean idyll. Ms Carmichael says they may move abroad again once their daughter's education is completed.
Meanwhile, we must hope the
battered pound strengthens sufficiently for Spitfire pilot Mr Ross to avoid spending his final years among strangers in some
draughty British old folk's home.
He surely deserves his place in the sun. And when it comes to helping hapless victims of the Costa Credit Crunch, the country for which he fought so valiantly is no longer a land fit for heroes.
Source: Daily Mail
