Mr. Robert Nicholson:

On the State pension, as the Senator will appreciate, some of the commitments in the roadmap for pensions for the first time try to maintain the State pension at 34% of average wages in the long term and remove the decisions around State pension levels from the annual budget cycle into some form of indexation were made specifically with automatic enrolment in mind. The aim is to engender confidence that this first pillar will be available to people in the long term such that they can calculate what further saving is necessary for them to achieve the pension they desire. However, they can be assured that first pillar will not reduce if they save for their retirement. The intention was to give confidence over the long term that that is safe and secure, which gives transparency in terms of what one needs to save for oneself. That was done specifically to ensure a coherency between the two systems.