Who has time for 500 pages of pension law?

As a Member of Parliament you want to do your job well. But how do you do that, with a legal text plus an explanation of almost 500 pages on a horribly complex subject such as the new pension system? Even econometrician Pieter Omtzigt (former CDA, now non-party), who has been following the pension file from the House of Representatives for more than fifteen years, found reading the documents “tough”. “The pieces of text are huge.”

CDA MP Hilde Palland still remembers where she was when she read the hefty government response to about 1,400 written parliamentary questions about the new pension law. Her child was running around in the indoor playground Binnen pleasure in Kampen, while she herself was sitting at a table – highlighter in hand, cup of coffee – reading. “Make lists of what strikes me.” And yes, “that is complicated”.

Parliament has been reprimanded several times in the last two years. “Attention to the legislative task of the House has declined,” wrote informateur Herman Tjeenk Willink in his final report. MPs must devote “more time and attention” to new laws, concluded the Council of State.

Members of Parliament also want to pay more attention to new laws, especially since the Allowances affair. The question arose: how could the House of Representatives agree to such a rock-solid law?

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That legacy also hangs over the debate over a new pension system, which is underway these weeks. It is one of the largest reforms since the Second World War, with more than 1,400 billion euros being redistributed. Between 2024 and 2027, pension funds will cut their one, large pension pot into personal pots. And there will be new rules for how employees save for their old age.

MPs realize: this cannot go wrong. “I don’t think anyone is waiting for us to have to prepare the next parliamentary inquiry,” said Senna Maatoug (GroenLinks) in one of the debates.

So how do you do your job as a Member of Parliament?

For Pieter Omtzigt, it starts with being present at all debates, he says. Even though they have taken more than sixty hours, spread over seven days. This often clashes with other, simultaneous debates. Omtzigt, for example, had to miss a debate on the price ceiling for energy on Thursday. “I have said to myself: I want to deal with one or two major laws every year. I want to be here from start to finish.”

Read diagonally

Chris Stoffer, SGP Member of Parliament, is sometimes surprised about parties voting against a law that they have not debated. The tradition, he says, was for parties to participate in the discussion about the laws they oppose. “Then you can still try to improve the law.”

And that thick bill of lading? Reading from cover to cover “is often not possible with such a large law,” says Stoffer. His policy officer has also mainly read the parts that the SGP wants to focus on: the survivor’s pension for widows and orphans, and the pension for self-employed persons.

CDA member Palland has read the entire explanatory memorandum, she says, but not the cabinet response to the 1,400 written parliamentary questions: more than 300 pages. “Normally I’ll get through it. Now I went through it diagonally and searched for my own questions.”

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More important than reading all the texts is understanding what it says. “Both legally”, says Omtzigt, “and when it comes to complicated calculation models”.

You should therefore seek good advice from experts and stakeholders. “Proponents, opponents: from different angles,” says CDA member Palland. Omtzigt is also assisted by a “group of experts” whom he has known for some time. “They also help me with my input.”

In the debates, the House of Representatives can roughly be divided into three blocks: the governing parties VVD, D66, CDA and ChristenUnie, which openly support the law. Parties such as SP, PVV and Pieter Omtzigt are the most vocally opposed to it. And the parties whose support is still unclear: PvdA, GroenLinks and SGP. They broadly agree with the change, but have questions about how it will work.

SGP member Stoffer believes that few MPs go into the ‘depth’. He sees four coalition parties “that are in favor of the law at all costs” and “call-honking” opponents who act “as if there is nothing good about it”.

Fear of Omtzigt

In the debates, Pieter Omtzigt is, next to Senna Maatoug of GroenLinks, the MP who asks the most fundamental, often detailed questions. Last week, Omtzigt took an hour and a half in a debate to sum up his concerns.

Chris Stoffer was impressed by that. “You can say: there are many questions and few solutions, and there is political coloring around it. But they were important questions.” What surprised Stoffer: Not once was Omtzigt interrupted by a proponent. “If he had been heavily heckled a few times by a coalition party,” says Stoffer, “his story would have had a very different impact. I don’t think they dared.”

That was not convenient, Palland admits. “We should have done that.” She says that a debate like this is intensive, takes hours, and as a coalition party you are dealt with severely. “Then you sometimes think: go ahead.”

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Omtzigt mainly objected to all current pension money being transferred to the new system, without people having anything to say about it. Minister Carola Schouten (Pensions) wants to switch to the new system in one go, to prevent pension funds from having to keep two systems in the air for another 70 years, the old and the new.

Schouten has already promised several adjustments to the House of Representatives. One of the most important was partly at the request of Omtzigt. An adjustment that Schouten now also calls an ‘improvement’.

That was about the way in which funds calculate how much money everyone gets in their personal pot. In some cases people threatened to receive much less money than is now reserved for them. Schouten has now added safeguards that prohibit such extreme outcomes.

Political squabbles

For Palland, who had also asked questions about this, it shows how the House of Representatives does its job: the law is getting better. But Omtzigt fears that there are even more imperfections in the law. “I can puncture a number of points, but I am undoubtedly missing points. Doubtless.”

Palland doesn’t want to be “too scared” to overlook something. “The entire pension sector is following this and asking us questions.” The Council of State was quite positive in its advice on the law. And: “It happens often enough that minor adjustments are made after the law has been passed.”

According to Omtzigt, the House of Representatives could have gone more in-depth by appointing four or five MPs, from different parties, as ‘rapporteurs’. Together they could then critically examine the law. “They do the technical preparatory work,” says Omtzigt, “after which the political groups can assess it”.

The House of Representatives already uses this method for budgets of ministries. A working group of MPs, led by SGP leader Kees van der Staaij, advised last year to do the same for important bills.

Working with rapporteurs will be more effective, Chris Stoffer believes, than the five-day ‘legislative consultation’ that the House of Representatives conducted on the pension law, in small committee rooms. That was intended for technical questions, but Stoffer also saw hours of political wrangling. “I’m for, I’m against — and invent all kinds of things.”

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What makes the pension law special is that it is based on negotiations between employers’ clubs, trade unions and the previous cabinet. In 2019 they concluded the pension agreement.

Even then, the four government parties, the same as now, and the PvdA and GroenLinks expressed their political support for this agreement in broad terms. Omtzigt calls this a ‘Ruttian way’ of creating support. He wonders: do the coalition parties dare to ask themselves openly and honestly ‘whether this system is going to do what it is supposed to do’?

Yes, says Palland. The CDA support for the pension agreement leads to a ‘positive basic attitude’, she says, ‘but that does not relieve me of the obligation to do my work and to ask critical questions’.

Stoffer also does not want to make a big issue of this. “As a Chamber, let’s look at ourselves,” he says. “Now the political culture is: I am very much for, or very much against.” Parties could achieve more, he thinks, with an open mind. “Then you can really improve laws.”