Chairman of Victoria Mutual Pensions Management Dr Judith Robinson is proposing that the Ministry of Labour & Social Security set a national target to radically increase the number of persons covered under the National Insurance Scheme.
“We need to move beyond the paltry 10 per cent of the elite who are entitled to some kind of retirement benefit,” she said. “They should set about doing this as soon as possible.”
Referencing September 2017 statistics from the Financial Services Commission, which show that private pension coverage stood at 9.45 per cent of the employed labour force, Robinson said “personally I am troubled – perhaps aggrieved would be a better word – by the low enrolment in pension schemes.
“Let us spare a thought for those hundreds of thousands of persons who work hard for their entire lives and yet have no retirement plan, no periodic predictable source of income on which to live,” she said while addressing VM’s annual retirement seminar on Tuesday.
“They depend on their families, on charity and the largesse such as it exists of religious and social bodies and corporate social programmes. They receive no structured old age support which could make them feel independent,” Robinson said.
With regard to the NIS, Robinson said she remembered the 1960s when the agency was introduced and what she thought were unnecessary deductions by her employer towards the scheme.
She also recalled what she described as a kind of buzz that overtook those who worked in the informal sector as household helpers, shop clerks, gardeners and others and who were persuaded to make minimum contributions with or without the assistance of their employers by buying NIS stamps to be affixed to their NIS stamp cards.
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