My frustrating battle to claim a French pension

On the morning of my 66th birthday, at the tail end of December, I received a phone call from the UK Department for Work and Pensions. My heart sank.

Some months earlier I had applied for a state pension. I had spent a considerable amount of time filling in the relevant forms and supplying the paperwork they asked for. I imagined this man was calling to tell me I had to rustle up yet another missing document or, worse, that I was not entitled to a state pension at all.

“I am calling you because you have asked for your pension on January 1,” he began.

“Yes,” I said, hesitantly, expecting the worst.

“Well, it's your birthday today,” he continued, “but you have asked to start your pension on the first day of the year. Are you sure about that? You could start your pension today. It would be a shame to lose two days' pay…”

I could not believe it. Two days' worth of pension does not amount to much, but this employee of the DWP had taken the trouble to make an international call to ensure I received all I was entitled to.

Contrast this with the attitude of French bureaucrats.

For the last few months I have been applying for my French state pension. Start early, I was warned, and expect frustration.

That is an understatement.

It is almost as if there is an official appointed to prevent me from getting what I am entitled to.

Getting started with the French pension system

I began the process as soon as I could by obtaining information from the Caisse d'assurance retraite et de la santé au travail (Carsat), which is broadly comparable to the UK's Pension Service.

I then created a personal online account on the Assurance retraite website, France's state pension service, and downloaded my career statement.

I was disappointed to find out that, in spite of having lived and worked in France for more than 20 years, I did not have enough trimestres (qualifying periods) for a full pension.

To give me anything at all, the website said I would have to supply a lorryload of information, but precisely what was not clear.

I tried to make an appointment to talk to someone in Carsat in person but it was impossible. The best they could do was a phone interview in a month's time. When the call time arrived, the adviser simply referred me to the website for answers that I knew were not there.

Despite being fluent in French, I was still baffled and so I arranged another phone appointment. Again, the adviser said she could not help me but rather curtly told me that if I could not manage to use the website I should go to my local branch of France Services.

A maze of documents and online accounts

France Services, if you have not yet come across it, is essentially an office connected to the internet where the staff promise to help you negotiate procedures that can only be carried out online.

I took my papers to Sabine at my local France Services and we sat down together and logged in to my account.

If you do one job for the same employer all your life, things are relatively simple. My employment history was more colourful. I had paid into several caisses de retraite (pension authorities) over my career and, in theory, they all communicate seamlessly with each other and share the same database. In practice, however, the result of this fragmentation can be chaos.

Two meetings down the line, Sabine stopped mid-keystroke, turned to me and said: “You have to account for the gaps in your record. You need to prove what you were doing 20 years ago.”

“I was raising a child,” I explained.

“You will have to obtain the relevant certificate to prove it. Come back in a month’s time with the proof.”

As I left her office she warned me: “This will not be the last thing they ask for. Get ready for the long haul. You may need to see me five or six times before your dossier is complete.”

She was not kidding. So began a routine of weekly visits in which we logged on to my account and found yet another item was being requested.

Sometimes we clicked, scanned and uploaded some minor document. Sometimes we could not connect to the official website; often it gave us error messages saying we had not uploaded a particular document when we knew we had.

Each time we had to appeal to technical support and wait days for them to respond, but even they did not know what was going wrong.

I lost count of the time spent on operations that could have been efficiently dealt with over the counter had Carsat been able to give me an interview with someone informed and competent.

Two websites, twice the paperwork

Eventually, a friend pointed out something rather unsettling. Not all branches of France Services are the same, she said, and not all the staff are as efficient as they could be. If I was having repeated difficulties, it could be that Sabine was well intentioned but out of her depth.

I switched to another France Services in another town where the manager, Marie-Claude, was far more clued up about what to do. She saw immediately what had been going wrong.

There are two websites to process French workers' retirement applications, she explained: L'Assurance Retraite and Info Retraite. They are supposed to share all information but sometimes a bug means that you have to upload the same document to both of them. Once we had figured this out, the error messages stopped appearing.

There was no getting away from Carsat's insatiable demands to know everything about me, but at last we started ticking off items on the checklist.

With luck, in a few months I will start getting paid my pension. I feel I have earned it, twice. Once by working and once by turning paperwork into uploadable PDFs so that some bureaucrat can glance at them and press her green OK button and give me my money back as a monthly dribble into my bank account.