Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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I have a number of questions and some of them are quite specific so I hope the witnesses will be able to answer them. I understand the restrictions so I will try to frame them to allow our guests to comment without straying into questions the Minister would answer if she were here. At present there is tax relief on private pensions. My party has argued it should be at the standard rate, and some of us have suggested it should be abolished altogether because the tax foregone by the State would be more than enough to cover the deficit.

At one stage, the suggestion was to reduce it to 30% or thereabouts. Has there been a major movement in that regard?

The report examined the impact of the re-rating of benefits to the consumer price index, CPI, rather than average earnings, which is the current aspiration. Were other indexing options considered? For example, the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice has developed an interesting consensual model for establishing minimum budgets for various household charges. Some indexation used to be skewed because a number of costs were quite high. When mortgages went through the roof, so too did the CPI, which incorporated those figures.

According to page 7 of the summary, the report assumes that the expenditure on illness benefit will decrease during the next five years due to changes in the duration of the entitlement. Is this a reference to a plan to introduce statutory sick pay or are further cuts or changes to the illness benefit that have not been signalled properly on the horizon?

In response to the national pensions framework, TASC suggested that a different type of State pension system be considered, namely, a two-tier pension with an auto-enrolment. I do not know whether the suggested model has been discussed or whether a consequential review of or change to the framework is intended. An auto-enrolment model could be managed by the Social Insurance Fund or the Department instead of the private sector.