Mr. Tim Duggan:

I thank the Chairman. It is critically important we meet and discuss this proposal with as many people as possible, and this committee is critical in that respect. We are delighted the members could find time in their schedule to fit us in.

I will make a few opening remarks and then Mr. Robert Nicholson will present the straw man proposal on an automatic enrolment, AE, savings system. The members will be aware the Government set out in its roadmap for pensions reform back in February that it intended pursuing a supplementary retirement savings system for the nation, based on an auto-enrolment type scheme. It set it out in some detail in that roadmap, with the promise that a more definitive straw man type proposal would be provided later in the year, and that is what we published in August.

I clarify for the committee that it is a proposal but it is not the definitive Government proposal. The reason the Government has published a straw man proposal is that in the past few years the Department has engaged in extensive consultation with up to 35 different stakeholder groups, comprising employer representatives, employee representatives, the community and voluntary pillar and industry. While there was absolute agreement that some form of supplementary pension scheme was necessary for Ireland, there was no agreement whatsoever on how that should be done or in what form. Consequently, we felt the best way to anchor the discussion and get the debate going for real, rather than have people talk about conceptual ideas and abstract notions, was to produce something tangible and to get people discussing that, the rights the wrongs, advantages and disadvantages, and pros and cons of it. Consequently, that is what this straw man proposal is meant to do, namely, to anchor that discussion and debate.

It is something that will feed into the Government's ultimate decisions around auto enrolment in the sense that there is this public consultation based on the straw man proposal and, in addition to that, the Department is assiduously gathering evidence and data from a whole host of different sources to come up with good analysis or evidence-building to help the Government to finalise its decisions.

We are also conducting a macroeconomic and microeconomic impact assessment of an auto-enrolment system on the nation. All of those things will feed into the Government's decision. We have not done this in an ivory tower. We have been engaging extensively, as I said, with 35 different stakeholder groups over the last couple of years but we have also been engaging extensively in international discussion. We have engaged with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, and a host of other countries. We have also engaged with experts from other countries, who have implemented similar arrangements in their jurisdictions, to try to make sure we worked out what seemed to work best, why it worked, the things that did not work so well, the lessons learned and to try to avoid some of the pitfalls that have occurred in other countries, as best we can in a dynamic environment.

This morning, we thought we would take the committee, as quickly as possible, through the straw man, not only to tell the committee what is in it but also to explain some of the rationale and thinking behind the proposal that has been made. That in itself will, hopefully, answer many of the questions members might have. We will do our best to answer any remaining questions after that.