Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 30 April 2014
225. Deputy Eoghan Murphy asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the number of persons in receipt of two or more pensions from the State and the cumulative value per annum paid to these persons. [18622/14]
View answerI assume that the Deputy's question relates to public service pensions only, and that it does not comprehend the various social insurance-linked and other pensions paid by the Department of Social Protection.
Public service pensions are not centrally administered. Instead the large number of separate public service pension schemes are operated by individual employers or sectoral authorities. In the context of this non-centralised administrative model, detailed information of the kind sought by the Deputy is not available to my Department. However, certain relevant information is available from the results of an exercise carried out in 2012 and 2013 by my Department in connection with the aggregation of pensions for purposes of the Public Service Pension Reduction (PSPR).
As the Deputy will be aware, the PSPR imposition on certain public service pensions was introduced on 1 January 2011 as provided for in the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Act 2010. Section 69 of the Public Service Pensions (Single Scheme and Other Provisions) Act 2012 subsequently amended the 2010 Act by providing that public service pensioners who have two or more qualifying public service pensions should have those pensions subjected to PSPR on a combined or aggregated basis, not separately as was originally the case. Section 5(5) of the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Act 2013 modified this requirement to aggregate pensions for PSPR purposes so that it only applies to persons whose multiple public service pensions, before application of PSPR, have a combined value of over €32,500.
In order to facilitate the implementation of PSPR aggregation, my Department conducted an exercise to ascertain those pensions in payment that would be subject to PSPR aggregation. Based on this exercise, the number of public service pensioners who receive more than one public service pension, and in respect of whom the combined value of those pensions, on a pre-PSPR basis, exceeds €32,500, is estimated at about 1,300, and the cumulative annual pay-out value of those pensions is estimated at about €70 million. I should point out that a significant proportion of multi-pension cases in the public service are represented by persons who, in addition to their own retirement pension, receive a survivor's pension in respect of a deceased public service spouse.
