Ms Roma Burke:

Ensuring women are saving for retirement is something that is very close to my heart. Going back to the previous question and the comment I made, the act of starting to save for retirement at the outset is key and auto-enrolment is helping to address that. It helps because a person is brought into a pension system, he or she is set up for saving and must elect to step out of that system. It is the principle of inertia that people tend to stay in something. Saving for retirement is important and by making it as easy as possible it encourages more people to save. Auto-enrolment also has a role in encouraging more women to save for retirement. Men and women sometimes have different priorities and are focusing on different things. It is a fact of life that women do not have as much retirement savings as men. Where they are automatically enrolled into this new system, it will encourage them to start saving. I wish I had done the numbers on it but there is a really big impact to saving a little over a long time and not trying to do the whole lot in the last run up to retirement. It is about small, steady saving from the day a person leaves school or college and is in his or her first job. It is about building that over time and that is what auto-enrolment does. The Citizen's Assembly said auto-enrolment should be gender-proofed. Women are sometimes in a lower salary bracket than men. There is a lower limit that on the level of salary a person is automatically enrolled into the system on. If that salary level is brought down it means more women are brought into the net. That is one thing we have discussed at council meetings, that is to say, if the salary threshold for joining the AE system is moved up or down it will impact on gender balance. We have brought that to the Department officials and they are considering that.