NETHERLANDS - The Dutch Association of Industry-wide Pension Funds, VB, doesn’t want to discuss the principles of collectivity and solidarity of the national pension system, said its employees’ chairman Hans van der Windt.

“I just don’t want to think of scheme members changing into age cohorts fighting each other. Then the genie will be really out of the bottle,” he writes in VB’s annual report.

According to Van der Windt, generational accounts will undermine collectivity and solidarity – and result in less flexibility. “Our present system, as no other system in the world, enables us to keep the problem of ageing under control,” he stressed.

The VB will also do anything to secure the mandatory make-up of industry-wide pension funds, to the benefit of both workers and employees, the chairman added.

The organisation has taken on a coordinating role in the research on pensions and retirement provision of five Dutch universities, it said. The coordination will – together with financing - eventually become a task of the Foundation for Pension Sciences, or SPW, which represents the umbrella organisations of pension schemes.

It will draft a guide for the implementation of the principles of pension funds government for its member schemes, as agreed by the Labour Foundation, or Star, it announced. The VB’s new board-support committee will assist the members.

A disappointing 40% of industry-wide pension funds has so far implemented the representation of pensioners on their boards of participants, in the way agreed between the Star and the cooperating organisation of the elderly, or CSO, VB said. Therefore, it has postponed the final evaluation by a year to 2008.

VB is the representative of 88 industry-wide pension funds, with 4.6m active members, 1m pensioners and 6m deferred participants. Their total assets under management are €400bn.