Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I might be able to tick all of those boxes. The reason I think these measures got through the gender proofing test is that it does not just affect women. I know it affects more women than men, but only marginally. Those affected are 60% women and 40% men, so we are nearly equally discriminatory to both sexes. That still does not make it all right.

Let us talk about the three different things Senator Higgins brought up. The first of these was the pensions anomaly whereby the averaging system penalised people because they started work very early, stopped to care for their families and then came back to work again. I have a report with some recommendations that will go to the Cabinet economic committee on 18 January 2018. Assuming that we agree at that table, it will then go to the full Cabinet committee the following week. As soon as it goes to Cabinet I will issue the report, because hopefully I will have agreement from my Cabinet colleagues on how to fix the anomaly and a roadmap of how to get there, starting in the following couple of months. That sets out when I am going to deal with the anomaly if not yet how. When I release the report the Senator will know how I am going to deal with it. Senator Higgins is right to say that the money cannot come from the current budget, because I do not have it. It is not small change. There are 42,000 people currently affected by it today, and rectifying this will cost the taxpayer money.

Moving to other topics, I will answer Senator Higgins's first amendment by saying that the Government is not going to extend the homemaker's scheme. I do not wish to be so brutal as to say "No" to the Senator. However, we propose to calculate pensions in the future by abolishing the averaging system. When we move to the total contribution approach on 1 January 2020, the averaging system will be gone and the length of time a claimant has worked will be irrelevant. The number of contributions needed to get into each band will be agreed through the public consultations that I will launch after Christmas, and there will be a sizeable carer's credit. That credit will be irrespective of whether claimants are minding their children or their older parents. It is not prescriptive. It will be as a result of the public consultation, but we will put out examples of what we think might work, and depending on the responses that we get from both industry and individuals, that will determine what the final model looks like. I hope to have an agreement between the middle and the end of next year on what the total contribution model will look like. Then we can begin creating an IT platform to be able to manage it, to collect and to pay, with a view to going live on 1 January 2020.

The second point is separate and distinct, but it reflects on subsection (e) of the proposed amendment. Senator Higgins is well aware that at the moment we give €2.6 billion worth of tax relief to people on both the 20% and the 40% bracket. That is unfair. The people who were earning more money get more tax relief than the people who were earning less money. The new model that we are introducing, which will also undergo public consultation after Christmas, is the auto-enrolment model. I would like to put it on the record that yesterday's front-page story in the Irish Independent, along with what was written by the young journalist on pages 13 and 14, is entirely inaccurate. She got her information from a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, which does not reflect the ambitions of the Department. I repeat, what will be subject to public consultation in January will not be a finished product. The finished product will be informed by the responses of members of the public on what they want to see. I have said it on the record before, and I will say it again here in this House. Whatever system we conform to at the end of that couple of months of public consultation will be entirely fair to everybody. People will not get more tax relief on the new auto-enrolment scheme because they happened to earn more money than others getting less tax relief.

Within a proposed salary bracket of between €20,000 and €60,000 - those figures are purely for the purposes of this discussion - if a claimant puts in €5, his or her employer will put in €5 and the State might put in €2.50. I emphasise that those figures are plucked from the sky. The actual figures will be determined by industry collaborating with us and individuals making suggestions of what they think they can afford. The misleading and entirely inaccurate story on the front of the newspaper yesterday, which said that people would have to put €200 of their wages into pension schemes every week or month, is wrong. It sets a very misleading tone for what should be a very exciting reform of pensions and tax relief, and a way for young people to save extra money over and above what they would normally get from either the non-contributing pension or the contributing pension when they reach 66 or 67.All of what the Senator has asked for, except the homemaker's credit, is going to be provided for in the anomaly provision on 18 January, the total contributions public consultation and the auto-enrolment public consultation. I will only guarantee the Senator that there will be a sizeable caring credit that will form part of the new total contributions model. The averaging system that affected people in that, while I will not call it unfair, made people not get as much money as they should have expected to get, will be entirely gone out of the new total contributions system. The exact parameters of that will be determined and arrived at from the public consultation.