Dr. Laura Bambrick:

No, the only provision will be in the case of serious life-limiting illness. We are very in favour of that. This committee will come under enormous pressure from individuals to say that people should be able to cash in for a deposit on their house, for children going to university, for their trip around the world, or for every other thing for which we would like to have a lump sum of money. However, this is a pension retirement savings scheme. That is its only purpose.

We know from looking at other models, such as the Kiwi model which is a case in point, where workers are saving for a number of years and there is a limited number of reasons, such as for a deposit on a house where he or she can cash in. This defeats the purpose of the scheme. In many of the schemes people do not have the level of savings they should given the age they are at or the length that they have been in the work market. We would be very strongly on the side of the legislation, which allows for very narrow, limited occasions on which there could be early withdrawing. As we said, that is the case of serious illness.