Mr. Tim Duggan:

We believe that auto-enrolment will automatically enrol somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 people. This is based on 2019 data. I have a personal hunch it will be higher than that because the employment rate has increased in the interim.

It is also worth remembering that there are 2.5 million people in employment in the economy, with 300,000 to 400,000 of those in public service-type jobs. This means 2.1 million to 2.2 million people work in the private sector, with only 700,000 of them in schemes, which means 1.3 million or 1.4 million people are not. If we get 800,000 people into this scheme then there will be 600,000 people outside of it. Some of those will be people who are not in active employment: they are of working age but some are outside of the ages and some are outside the income limits we are setting.

On the question of hospitality, I would argue that hospitality employs people under the age of 23 in the main. They are the very people who can do this work because it is casual, part time, it is at evenings and weekends, and all of that kind of stuff. One finds huge numbers of that age group in that industry naturally anyway. There is nothing unusual there.

The reason I mentioned those figures of 700,000 people in schemes is to show that people of the age of 23 are not necessarily going into jobs that put them into occupational schemes. Huge numbers, some two thirds of the private sector, are not in occupational schemes. Occupational schemes are not growing. Defined benefit schemes are disappearing. Defined contribution schemes are not growing in the sense that few new ones are being launched by organisations. I do not believe it would be fair to suggest that people coming out of college at the age of 23 are going to into employment that will automatically put them into occupational schemes. It is more likely that they will not and, therefore, auto-enrolment is where they will end up.

With regard to the cohort of 100,000, it is hard to know. I will go back to what I said at the very beginning. At every hand's turn in trying to determine the design of this we have tried to strike that balance between, on the one hand, the need to be in a scheme to provide for adequacy in retirement, and affordability on the other. We are taken by the fact that quite a number of the organisations that best represent people in low income brackets are concerned that they do not have discretionary spend if they are of an older age group, and if they are of a younger age group the purpose of that income is to drive that education and the ancillary elements around getting that education. We do not want to interfere with either of those unnecessarily. Hence, setting those two thresholds, but at exactly the same time facilitating to enrol themselves and opt in if they wish to. I assure the committee that the communications campaign we are developing will exhort people to enrol if they can. It will highlight all of the benefits and all of the advantages and it will highlight what people will get from it. We will really try to enthuse and encourage people to enrol. The Minister and the Department feel that on balance it is better to give them the option rather than force them at those income brackets and in those age groups.