Naoise Ó Muirí (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)

Go raibh maith agat a Cheann Comhairle and Minister. I welcome auto-enrolment. It has been a long time in the making but it is great to see that it is finally going on the blocks. I agree with Deputy Gogarty that it is really a saving scheme at this stage rather than a pension scheme. This is mainly because the pensions bit has probably not been worked out yet but the thrust is to get people contributing to the future, which is fair enough.

Regarding fees, I read the note the Department has on its site, which reads:

Charges will be set and fully explained nearer the launch date of 30th September 2025, but it is expected they will comprise -

• A modest weekly flat fee to cover the running of NAERSA’s administrative costs, and
• An investment management charge based on a percentage of participants’ savings ...

I do not think we should do that. We have an opportunity here. The Government has the opportunity to set this out for the future. A modest weekly flat fee is like the old charge on the meter for the ESB. It goes on forever and it builds in inefficiency. We should not do that. An investment management charge based on percentage of participant saving is a fee based on what is in the savings account. We should be encouraging fees based on performance. Whoever is managing the money, if they are making money for citizens of the State, we should be encouraging them based on those fees.

The site also reads: "The State is taking a number of steps to ensure that the money invested on your behalf stays as safe as possible". It sets out a kind of profile of low-risk investment and supervision. It is all quite flat in terms of profile and it is conservative. That is fair enough at one level for pensions, but for a 25-year-old construction worker who is contributing to a scheme like this for the first time and has a risk appetite, we really should be incentivising some level of investment performance rather than just leaving the money in place somewhere and having such low expectations for how the money would perform.

There are a couple of things about the scheme. I think it should be put online. Make it a big, centralised, standardised scheme with standard processes, standard interfaces for people putting information into the scheme about themselves and employers, and standard reports coming out. Standardise everything, have minimum manpower running the scheme, and have it computerised and as efficient as possible. That is how it would run. I imagine it will be quite standardised.

With regard to the size of the fund, it will get very big because, over time, there will be a huge amount of savings invested and tied up in the scheme, and rightly so. That is the way it should be, but there could be temptations for those in the future to try to access it and use it as a rainy day fund. It is very important that we legislate so that the fund cannot be used for anything else but that it belongs to the punters who put the money in and, thankfully, the State that would have contributed.

My final point goes back to the point of savings. There is not a whole lot of detail on the benefit side. I can understand that in terms of where we are now, but it is important that we at least address this in some way so that punters will understand what they will see coming out once they put money in.

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