In the last two years, nearly all my contributions for this section have been about the ongoing reform of the Dutch pension system, which will involve the transfer of defined-benefit (DB) accruals to a defined-contribution (DC) setting.
Last month, plenary discussions in the Dutch parliament on the Law on Future Pensions, as it is officially called, finally underwent a long-awaited start after several postponements.
One may be forgiven to think that one day would suffice to debate a law that had been in the making for years and had already been discussed extensively during expert sessions and other hearings with pension experts.
But dream on: led by the hard-right PVV and the far-left SP, two unlikely bedfellows who have joined forces in resisting the move to DC, the opposition successfully managed to frustrate the debate until it was suspended at 1.30am the next morning. Only to be continued the following week, to end inconclusively once more.
Then the exceptional news came that parliament will debate the 73-page long law article-by-article due to its complex nature, something that was last seen in 1993. This will delay the process by at least another few weeks, making the year-end deadline seem ever more ambitious.
The government will need to get the law through the Senate before elections scheduled for March, when it it is likely to lose so many seats that even opposition help will not be enough to garner enough support.
Meanwhile, Léon de Jong of the largest opposition party PVV has already indicated his ultimate goal is to delay the process by another couple of months to make sure that the final chapter of the Dutch pension law saga will never be written.
Tjibbe Hoekstra, Netherlands Correspondent
tjibbe.hoekstra@ipe.com
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