Dr. Micheál Collins:

There is a big change for auto-enrolment. What we have done up to now is to use the tax system to incentivise people to save. The real truth is that it has not worked particularly well. It has worked well for higher income earners but not for all of the people who are now being enrolled. The figures are approximately 750,000 employees, which is a huge number who were missed out before and are now being auto-enrolled. What is intriguing though is if one makes the comparison, and I do not have the figures in front of me, of the difference between most workers who are getting tax relief at 40% by putting money into their pensions and the individuals who are being auto-enrolled who, proportionally, are getting a smaller top-up from the State. I do not have the figures in front of me to give them to the Deputy but the top-up is smaller. It is an interesting question as to why we are giving less help to one group versus the other. Should it not be the same across all groups? Those are interesting questions. As that system beds down, the cost of auto-enrolment will increase because as more money goes in and the proportion of employee and employer contributions increase over time the cost to the State increases. The interesting questions in the budgetary oversight process overall will be about how good this is to be used. I suggest rolling that in with the pension tax reliefs as well. We are trying to do the same thing which is to make people save for their retirement, some of it though direct expenditure on auto-enrolment and some of it through tax relief on contributions. It would be worth pulling all of that together to examine the effectiveness and fairness of it overall.