The motions were submitted during the debate on the government statement in the Senate. The House also spoke out against decoupling the AOW and in favor of more generous compensation for students who have gone into debt as a result of the loan system. These are plans from the coalition agreement that have not yet been submitted to parliament.
The Senate wants to receive a response from the cabinet before 8 March. Part of the Senate wants a debate on this immediately afterwards. Last year a similar scenario took place in debates about the rent increase. That resulted in a motion of censure. The coalition of VVD, D66, CDA and ChristenUnie has only 32 of the 75 seats in the Senate.
Senate as a new playing field
The fact that the Senate is moving away from the House of Representatives is in line with the change of role of the Senate that has taken place over the past ten years. Traditionally, the Senate has limited itself to a legal test of legislation – whether it is understandable, executable and enforceable. Since successive Rutte cabinets have had to do without a majority in the Senate, the opposition has an important playing field to increase the pressure on the government.
Apart from Forum for Democracy, the entire opposition in the Senate rejects cuts to youth care and the one-off decoupling of the state pension. The proposed cuts in child benefits can only count on the support of the coalition parties. A proposal for wider compensation for students who have run into debt over the loan system was passed with only the coalition parties and Forum against.
The motions have no direct effect, but they do provide an important political signal: if the plans from the coalition agreement are not changed, major problems are looming in the Senate. After the debates about the government statement in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Rutte IV cabinet has always said that the plans from the coalition agreement still need to be worked out. Before 1 June, the cabinet wants to announce concrete plans when adjusting the budget in the so-called Spring Memorandum.
Dependence on AOW
The decoupling of the state pension has already led to indignant reactions in the House of Representatives from most opposition parties. The coalition agreement includes a one-off increase in the minimum wage of 7.5 percent by 2024. Normally, the minimum benefits follow such an increase, the so-called linkage. The coalition wants this increase to apply to social assistance, but not to the AOW.
That is against the sore leg of the opposition. In an adopted motion by Senator Lennart van der Linden (Nanninga Group), the Senate points out that ‘more and more self-employed workers and employees with flexible jobs do not or hardly build up supplementary pension and will be completely dependent on the state pension after retirement’. . He also points out that ‘the purchasing power of many elderly people will be hit even harder by the decoupling of the state pension’.
The cutbacks in youth care involve cutting 500 million euros from the budget that municipalities receive for youth. The municipalities and youth care have been vigorously agitating against this plan for weeks.