Dr. Laura Bambrick:

I thank the committee for its patience in waiting for my arrival.

I will take the questions on the unforgone tax collection around occupational and private pensions. As with other issues around universal pensions that have been raised during the short time I have been at this meeting, this was outside the scope of the commission but I have no doubt that it will be closely examined by the ongoing Commission on Taxation and Welfare. We must remember that the policy objective of the State pension is just to keep people out of poverty. It is not about meeting their normal living standards. As such, it is important that people not only have access to the State pension but also to a top-up, be that an occupational pension or a private pension, so that they do not have a significant collapse in their living standards when they reach retirement age. While there are improvements to be made in tax-free allowances around second-tier pensions, we must recognise that they meet an important policy objective in and of themselves. That will be part of ICTU's submission to the current commission.

The question on linking the pension age to demographics was recommended in previous pension policy, in that, in 2035, which will be seven years after the pension age eventually reaches 68 years of age in 2028, we would start to link the pension age to demographics. As life expectancy extended, so would the pension age.

The assumption would be that if life expectancy stalled or reversed in some way, we would have a corresponding change in the pension age. The issue that unions have always had with that is that life expectancy increases but they do not happen universally. We can see from health research done by Trinity College that there is a difference between the poorest and richest parts of the country of six years and four months for women and seven years for men. If we are going to link the pension age to demographics, we must recognise that while we all might, on average, be getting older we are not all getting older to the same extent. That would be the real concern for us. This is why Congress has for a long time pushed for what is recommended by the commission in that the State pension would not only recognise the number of candles on one's birthday cake but would also recognise the number of years that one has contributed into the system through paid or caring contributions. That would come into effect because we know, on average, that the younger one enters employment, the more likely one is to do hard, physical labour and therefore the more likely one is to die at an earlier age than a professional who is universally educated, in a non-manual job and, as Mr. Taft said, is going to live longer and have more years of healthy life.