Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

I found the consultants' reports curious in many ways and, as I said earlier, I think the terms of reference had a great deal to do with that. I find it hard to square the analysis and the recommendations of the consultants' reports with the facts they presented in the course of the reports. If they are saying, as Indecon has said in its executive summary, that tax reliefs are a highly costly and wasteful form of achieving policy goals, I find some of their recommendations inconsistent in the extreme.

It is fairly convenient that the expiry date for these reliefs, as with the introduction of tax liability for stud fees on stallions and greyhounds, will be after the next general election. If the Minister wants his legacy to include bringing about change and equity, these changes should be introduced now. If the Government was really interested in making up lost ground on this issue, the changes should have been introduced several years ago.

The measures the Minister is introducing in this Finance Bill are the rabbits in the hat that we do not get to learn about on budget day. The Minister is showing too tentative an approach, particularly on the proposals concerning SSIA holders and pensions. The Minister should be acknowledged as having tried to put in place some mechanism to encourage further saving and many Members of the House would approve of that. The difficulty is, however, that the thresholds he set for being within the 20% band and the income limit exclude far too many people who could and should benefit from such a move. The Government seems to be in a heap over what exactly its pensions policy is. We have a national pensions fund which seems likely to cover only the public sector pensions bill when it comes to fruition. There is massive inequity as regards how existing tax reliefs are being used and who benefits from private pensions. Those inequities will increase because of the proposals the Minister is making in this Bill. However, the Government seems to adopt an almost timid approach to what the basic State pension should be in ten, 15, 20 or 25 years' time. The benchmark we should set for our pension policies is a guaranteed standard of living for all citizens when they retire. They may no longer contribute economically to the manufacturing or services sectors but they will still be consumers.

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