NETHERLANDS – A Dutch MP has called for the dual supervision of the pensions industry – by the central bank and the AFM market authority – to be scrapped.

Bibi de Vries of the liberal VVD foresaw more bureaucracy because both De Nederlandsche Bank and the Autoriteit Financiële Markten will be doing the same job.

Comments on the matter were supported by delegates at the annual meeting of the Dutch Association of Industry-wide Pension Funds, the VB, last week.

She called on the DNB to urge the government to give it the total supervisory role, leaving the AFM in a minor position. The idea has already received the support of most other political parties aw well.

The proposed Pension Law also came under fire at the meeting.

According to the new chairman of the Foundation of Company Pension Funds or OPF, Loek Sibbing, the new proposal gives no room for the new collective DC agreements, which are increasingly taking over current DB and DC systems.

Sibbing stated that the new Pension Law should be more specific regarding the collective DC, which puts investment risks almost totally on members’ shoulders.

Pension fund sponsors such as Akzo Nobel and DSM are currently implementing collective DC to ease the risks of having to put in additional pension fund financing.

Sibbing indicated that the new law does not have any instruments included for the collective DC’s. At present, the only two options included are DB and DC.

The OPF calls upon the government and parliament to put the latter into the new Pension Law to indicate what the precise financial requirements will be for the latter.

Earlier, Watson Wyatt’s Stefan Tabak had pointed out that the new bill hardly pays attention to the investment risks within collective DC.

Meanwhile, a record number of civil servants and teachers have taken early retirement under the VUT scheme last year, figures of the large civil service scheme ABP have revealed. With a total of 33,675, the numbers were up 56%.

According to the €191bn pension fund, this was mainly due to the last legal possibility to early retirement. New legislation on VUT, prepension and levensloop, or life course, is meant to discourage early retirement.

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