Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

That is not an issue that we have looked at or on which we particularly take a view. Having a fair and efficient tax system is important to supporting compliance in the tax system more generally. We welcome anything that strengthens that.

On the pensions question, there are issues such as the one the Deputy mentioned. Over the next decades, there will be a significant increase in pension spending if we do not change the pension age to take account of the fact that people are living longer and the cohorts that will be reaching retirement in the next ten or 20 years are much bigger than previous cohorts. The number of people reaching retirement age will be far greater. Those two effects each account for half of the increase that we will get in pensions costs as a share of national income. Those costs are very big. There are not many alternatives and that is what the Commission on Pensions has found. It has concluded, as we did in our long-term report, that the current system is not sustainable. It recommended various approaches for dealing with that. It made a recommendation that basically would involve indexation, which would cover 40% of the overall increase in the share of national income that would need to go into pensions, with the rest coming from taxation and also the Exchequer. There are not many ways of avoiding these sorts of measures. Obviously, there are some other things one can do that would help to adjust the cost but, underneath, those two drivers are very big and need to be addressed directly.