Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-07-03-Speech-2-117"
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"en.20010703.7.2-117"2
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"Mr President, I should like, first of all, to welcome some visitors from Kent who we are fortunate enough to have in the gallery today. I would also like to thank Mr Karas for all the very hard work he has done on a very difficult report.
We have to bear in mind that what we are creating here is an optional scheme for companies and financial service providers to take advantage of if they want to. If we do not create an attractive framework, this directive will be a dead letter because no one will use it. If we overload this directive with prescriptive detail, with centralising details, it will not reflect the diversity of pension arrangements across the EU and, again, we will not have people taking up the opportunities provided by the directive.
So where would we lose out if companies decided that they were not going to bother to use this directive? We would lose out largely on the prudent investor principle. A European Commission survey recently said that, had we used this principle across the European Union over the last 15 years, our pension funds would probably have performed at least twice as well as they have in fact performed. Private sector estimates put the increase in the return on savings that could result from using the prudent investment principle at up to 3%. Pension assets could be around 21% larger across the European Union if we had been using the prudent investor principle already.
What we have here is the potential for increased return on savings without increased risk. That is a very real and practical benefit to the people who elected us to serve in this House on their behalf. That is a benefit that we should not throw away by piling into this directive overly prescriptive details, for example, on authorisation, on biometric risk, on guarantees. We need to take a pragmatic approach in order to gain those benefits of an increased return for our savers in a first attempt at defusing the pensions time-bomb."@en1
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