Ms Josephine Feehily:

I thank the Deputy. I will pass over to Ms Burke to deal with the question on costings and savings. By the way, income tax was introduced by the British Government as a temporary arrangement during the Napoleonic Wars. The issues of transition and long working lives are kind of tied in together. We did not revisit the transition pension. We received quite a lot of inputs and views that the retirement condition irritated many people in the transition pension. Back in the day, it was called the retirement pension. The idea that one retired for a year and then went back to work the following year and continued to get the same pension was regarded by many people as being slightly laughable. That point was made to us. We did discuss returning to a thing called a transition pension. We discussed whether we might recommend the reinvention of a retirement condition for an early pension but, taking account of the submissions made to us, decided that would be complicating things all over again. I take the Deputy's point that some people are able and willing to continue to work and, in fact, actively seeking to continue to work, otherwise we would not have a row about the employment contract issue. There are people who wish to keep working, while there are others who do not wish to keep working or cannot do so. In the context of any increase in the age, we recommended that at the age of 65 people with a long insurance record - they are likely to be the people the Deputy is describing who cannot continue working and are likely to have started quite young - would get a pension without any transition or retirement condition. That was our reasoning in respect of not returning to the transition pension.