Mr. Tim Duggan:

I am as confident as I can be that we will progress the initiative sufficiently this year to start making the payments in the first quarter of next year, as promised. We have always said we would start issuing the invitations in the fourth quarter. The reason is that we knew we had to build processes and procedures. We had to get legislation drafted and enacted, and we had to get a complicated IT system developed. We always knew it would take more than six months to get all the preparatory work done and, therefore, the fourth quarter was when we could start issuing letters to people. We want the systems to be ready and we do not want any delays being once people are invited to seek a review. Many of them will be simple and easy to process. There will be no big issue trying to work out whether they are entitled. It will be a simple calculation, particularly with the system I mentioned. Consequently, once we are able to issue invitations I am confident we will get payments going for all those cases quickly. Hence, the first quarter is realistic.

There will be some cases where we will have to do exploratory work. While we are keen to ensure we do not put a heavy burden or onus of proof on anybody, we are obliged to protect the Social Insurance Fund and taxpayers' money and, therefore, we will have to do certain checks to comply with the Comptroller and Auditor General's requirements and obligations. Aside from that, we will make this as simple as we can for people. I am confident we will get payments going in the first quarter of next year.

The home caring credit of 20 years is new. There has not been anything similar to it previously. A disregard was introduced in 1994, but that is not a credit. It is a disregard and it only works in a yearly averaging system. It would not work in a system that is reliant on counting the number of contributions rather than an averaging approach. There has always been a limit on the number of credits people could claim for pension calculation purposes. In this case, we have set the home caring credit at the maximum limit. A person can claim 20 years of credits in whatever way the person wishes that pertains to the person's life and the circumstances in which he or she found himself or herself, but there is a limit of 20 years. We did not put the same limit on home caring as is on all the other credit systems. We allowed it to be at the maximum, and the maximum has been maintained.

The move from 260 to 520 contributions is not new. While it was introduced near the beginning of the decade, the reality is that it was introduced in legislation in the 1990s, not in 2012. It has been flagged for 20 years and came from a significant volume of analyses and reports carried out over the years. The legislation has been on the Statute Book for a long time.

With regard to the automatic enrolment system that was introduced in the UK, the Deputy is correct that initial costs were high. A number of aspects in the UK are different. First, the scale is significantly vast compared with here. That does not mean we do not have high costs but that there is a proportionality element to it. Second, the UK felt it had to introduce a backstop arrangement, if I can use that phrase. My UK colleagues do not appear to like it much. It had to introduce a contingency in the event that the market did not provide a service to low income individuals, in particular. That has resulted in much of the significant cost the Deputy mentioned. It will go out for consultation so we are not being definitive about any aspect of the design but we will be particularly interested to hear people's views on that matter and whether there is a necessity for a State default. However, there are also alternatives that would not require that and thereby would not incur the type of costs the Deputy mentioned. I am hopeful that we could steer it in that direction.