Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-177"
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"en.20021217.6.2-177"2
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". – Mr President, today, the Commission has adopted a comprehensive analysis of the Member States' strategies for ensuring adequate and sustainable pensions.
The fact that, in spite of this diversity of systems, we could agree on a set of common objectives proves that it makes sense to speak of a European social model. The diversity of pension systems does not prevent us from having shared goals in this important policy area.
In general, the national strategy reports described the current state of play rather than presenting new policy initiatives. The Member States involved not just different government departments in their preparation, but also social partners and other interested parties and, in some cases, there has been approval by the national parliaments.
One important conclusion that we can draw from this exercise is that Member States can cope with ageing societies and avoid a financial or social disaster in their pension systems.
The report tries to be neither unduly alarmist, nor too complacent about the situation of pension systems. Indeed, there are a lot of positive developments highlighted in the report, but there are also considerable weaknesses. In many countries, the sound financing of future pension benefits has not been secured. One very effective way of achieving this would be to raise the effective retirement age. In fact, achieving the Barcelona target of raising the labour market withdrawal age by five years would almost solve our financing problems as identified in the public pension expenditure projections by the Economic Policy Committee. However, we will only get there if Member States make much more determined efforts not only to encourage older people to stay longer in the labour market but also to enable them to do so. The European Parliament rightly insisted on the importance of health and safety in this regard and on the need to adapt the working environment to the special needs of older workers.
Many Member States also have to do more to improve access to occupational pension schemes, particularly for atypical workers, among whom women tend to be over-represented. The portability of occupational pension rights also requires further improvements, and we will be discussing with the social partners at European level how this could be promoted.
The European Parliament insisted particularly on the situation of older women. Women tend to live longer than men; so a majority of pensioners are women: some 60% of people over 65 and nearly two thirds of people over 75. The gender dimension therefore receives much attention in this report. We can expect individual pension rights for women to increase, thanks to increased labour force participation and smaller pay gaps between men and women. However, career breaks still tend to be taken more often by women than by men. So it will remain important to award pension rights for child-care periods and to maintain derived rights, without which many older women would be exposed to the risk of poverty. However, our priority should be to increase individual pension rights by offering better employment opportunities to women.
What is going to happen next with this report? The European Council requested a joint report by the Commission and the Council. So the next step will be to examine the Commission's text in the Council so as to finalise a report in time for the European Council meeting in March.
There is no commitment to a second round of national strategy reports and their assessment at European level. However, we are committed to reviewing the common objectives and working methods before 2005 as a basis for deciding on the future of this cooperation.
We intend to cooperate with the applicant countries and to carry out the same exercise for their systems. We are also working on common indicators which would allow us to measure the achievements of Member States. However, agreement on common indicators is quite a difficult issue and could not be arrived at in time for this report.
This report is the fruit of a new form of cooperation between the Member States, given the consensus that pension systems should remain a responsibility of the Member States, and so the role of the European Union will be limited to supporting the Member States in their reform efforts.
This is, of course, without prejudice to the Community policies in a number of areas which have an impact on national policy-makers, including internal market policy and the sustainability of public finances, which is examined in the framework of the broad economic policy guidelines. Moreover, the financial sustainability of pensions depends very much on the success of the European employment strategy.
I am very pleased that the European Parliament supports this approach, even though we have yet to find a satisfactory way of involving Parliament more in the open method of coordination.
The agreement on applying the open method of coordination to the issue of pensions was reached at the Laeken European Council one year ago. On that occasion, 11 common objectives were set covering the adequacy of pensions, their financial sustainability and the modernisation of pension systems to adapt them to changes on the labour market and in society, notably to ensure that they cater well for the needs of women.
An important concept of the whole report is that there are three different dimensions: sustainability, modernisation and adequacy of pensions. It is not just the one dimension that we had until now in our European policies, which was within the framework of public finances.
It was also agreed that the Member States would submit national strategy reports in which they explain how they achieve those common objectives. The national reports were submitted in September, and the document that has been adopted by the Commission today is an analysis of the national strategies, objective by objective.
The Commission's aim was not to establish a ranking of Member States or to lecture them. The open method of coordination on pensions is not a beauty contest. Member States have to decide for themselves what type of pension systems they want. But our report tried to highlight certain and concrete strengths and weaknesses of national systems and policies.
The common objectives can be achieved through a wide range of pension systems. Member States have either flat-rate public pension schemes covering all residents, or earnings-related schemes where benefits are based on employment. They rely to varying degrees on private-funded provision to complement these public schemes. The social partners play a more or less important role in national pension systems."@en1
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