Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Deputy Ó Caoláin is correct to say there has been significant reference to this issue recently but the public service benchmarking body is proceeding with a review of pay in public service grades covered by its terms of reference and will report at the end of the year. It is under the Department of Finance but, as I understand from discussions which have taken place in the past year, it involves a job evaluation of public service grades as well as a survey of private sector jobs and pay. It will assess what is happening in the public and the private sectors. Submissions were invited by the benchmarking body, via a newspaper advertisement, from interested parties and many submissions on general issues were made to its website by public service employers and the public service committee of congress. Many of the comments made by Deputy Ó Caoláin came out of that process.

As part of the overall benchmarking process, oral hearings have taken place with both employer and union groups in recent months and the results, which are currently being processed, will be included in the report at the end of the year. A fundamental examination of the pay of public service employees vis-À-vis the private sector will be undertaken. There are no predetermined outcomes and it is not, as the Deputy called it, an exercise in capping or cutting back people's pensions. However, one cannot examine the benefits an individual in the public sector receives against what one in the private sector receives, which is what benchmarking involves in accordance with the benchmarking body's terms of reference, without reflecting the value of respective pension entitlements. The public service pension arrangements are very valuable and incorporate very good schemes which would be very costly in the private sector so, as I understand it, they will be taken into account. Such schemes are of genuine benefit and a genuine examination of both sectors must take them into account. The process does not cap a pension scheme but will take into account the value of a pension scheme in the course of the analysis of an individual in the public sector as against one in the private sector.

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