Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As we know, the State pension provides a basic level of income and an effective protection against pensioner poverty. It is not designed or intended to secure full pension adequacy for all retirees in the sense of replacing employment income on retirement. One does have a situation where people have a sudden drop in their income and that is where one needs to have a supplementary pension.

Only 35% of private sector employees have a pension. The fear is that when those people reach retirement they will have a huge reduction in their living standards so I am going to bring a proposal to Government, in February, to finalise the design of the auto-enrolment system. People will have to sign up to the auto-enrolment system and the employee, employer and the Government will all contribute towards it. I am trying to design the system so that it is fair and attractive. The system must be attractive so people will want to enter into it because I know that when I was in my late 20s and early 30s a pension was far from what I was interested in. Instead, I was interested in getting a deposit on a house.

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