Mr. Tim Duggan:

The Deputy is correct that, other than the 51,000 to whom we will write, there are people are on reduced rate pensions who may do better under the new system but will not be captured by our mass invite. At the same time, we will publish a great deal of information about how the system works, how it will be calculated and so on. Lots of information will be provided publicly so that people can look for themselves. We will issue a general invitation, with advertisements on radio, in newspapers, on social media and so on. We will provide a briefing to public representatives, such as committee members, to make sure people are as informed as they can be that this is available and may be relevant to them, in which case they can send in a request for their pension calculation to be reviewed. It will be nothing like those numbers but there will be some people and we will provide a means by which they can seek a review. We will concentrate initially on the ones we know about.

As I said in reply to Deputy O'Dea, the evidence people have to provide will be simple and easy. The degree of evidence they will have to provide will probably be nil. If somebody is on our system as having received child benefit for the period in question and was not been in employment at exactly the same time, it will be an easy calculation to make and we expect that many of them will be in that category. Other than that, it will depend on what they are claiming credit for. If it is for childminding or caring, it means they were not in receipt of child benefit in this jurisdiction so we may seek some proof that they had it in some other jurisdiction. That is easy enough to get from the systems in other jurisdictions and it will not be particularly onerous.

It is a little more difficult for people who were not looking after children but were looking after others and we have not yet teased out precisely what type of evidence we will seek in those cases. We are more than happy to take suggestions from anybody, including the committee, on that. We will discuss what the audit expectation is from the Comptroller and Auditor General. We have not made any firm decisions on that. That is part of the design work we are doing.

I can be definitive that no decision has been made on the number of years of contributions required for the TCA and we have said this on every occasion we have spoken publicly on the question. In the consultation document we launched, one of the main questions relates to people's views on the number of years of contributions that should be required to achieve a full contributory pension. The confusion arises from the fact that T12 is based on 40 years but that is an interim solution to deal with a very specific problem and does not necessary dictate how the full implementation of TCA will be dealt with from 2020 onwards. It is very much an issue to be decided and we genuinely want to hear people's views.