Dr. Laura Bambrick:

I thank the Deputy. Regarding some of the questions, if the committee has not already planned to invite the Pensions Authority, it would benefit from hearing from them. They will be able to answer these questions in much more detail. I am sure my colleague will make a good stab of it; maybe I should not tar him with my own brush. To start off with why we are going down this road and not the pay-related pension model common across continental and Nordic Europe, I do not know if it was originally thought of which road we would go down, auto-enrolment or moving to pay-related pensions. We know from media reports that Cabinet at the moment is considering moving toward pay-related jobseeker's allowance and possibly pay-related maternity and other family payments. That would be a significant move; I am sure the Deputy remembers back in the 1980s and early 1990s that there were pay-related payments in that regard for just over a decade. There seems to be some willingness, having learned from the experience of the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, and how that was pay-related and the job that did of protecting workers' living standards when they could not work when the economy was shut down.

I do not know if auto-enrolment was compared to moving towards a pay-related pension. At the time this was being considered in 2007, New Zealand introduced KiwiSaver, which is to all intents and purposes the same as what we are moving to. In 2012, the UK moved to an auto-enrolment process. The international move was towards the second layer of auto-enrolment rather than the continental and Scandinavian pay-related model. I hope there was some justification in doing so.

On the question about returns, the Pensions Authority will be much better at giving that. The Department's literature, which I do not have with me, provides examples of a what the pension of a worker at a particular age putting in a certain contribution would probably be.