The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations has made a firm commitment to promoting employment pension plans, of a collective nature, with the aim of promoting future savings as a complement to the public pension. The Courts gave the green light more than a year ago to the new law decorated for this purpose, however, the regulation to develop one of the novelties of the regulation was pending: the main publicly promoted employment pension funds (FPEPP). Sources from the department of José Luis Escrivá acknowledged to this medium that the text was ready, pending the opinion of the Council of State. The advisory body of the Government has pronounced this Thursday in this regard, leaving everything ready for the regulation to be approved in the last Council of Ministers before 23-J.
So far, only the construction sector and some large companies have launched plans of this type. On the other hand, self-employed workers and those in small and medium-sized enterprises had been left out, since these instruments should be developed at the initiative of the employer within the framework of collective bargaining. The public promotion planes aspire to cover this gap with the offer of 15 investment vehicles that will be managed by five financial firms, which will also take charge of the deposit, according to what appears in the bidding documents. At the moment, it is not known with certainty the requirements of the seven entities will be made with the public contract, since the Contracting Committee must study the “abnormally low” offers from Caser and BBVA.
This body has a period of 48 hours to issue its decision, which will come to an end this Friday. The members of the Promotion and Monitoring Commission will also be present at this deliberation, with representation from the portfolios of Social Security, Economic Affairs, Ecological Transition, Labor and Finance, by authorization of the number two of Escrivá, Borja Suárez. Although, pending the final decision, Vida Caixa, Caser, BBVA, Santander and Ibercaja have received the best score through the automatic criteria, after three of them adhered to the CNMV Code of Good Practices. Thus, it seems that both processes will culminate in parallel at the gates of the general elections, leaving the ‘homework done’ to the next Executive.
Escrivá’s cabinet has managed to meet the deadlines set at the beginning of the year ‘in extremis’, since the forecast was that this document was approved in July, however, the early call to the polls opened the possibility that the Security project d Social remained in the air, after months of negotiation with the social agents and the rest of the political formations. However, the fact that it is a regulation and not a decree-law makes it easier for the process to be completed, because it is not necessary for the document to go through the Permanent Commission of the Congress of Deputies to be validated.
As confirmed by sources from the department, the Government had requested the Council of State to urgently rule on this regulation, so the Permanent Commission of this body has ruled on opinion 760/2023, which must be published in the coming days in the Official State Gazette (BOE). This is the last step in a broader plan, given that throughout the legislature the Government has progressively raised the deductible contributions in the income statement to these employment pension plans (up to 8,500 euros), to the detriment of the individuals, whose contribution limit was set at 1,500 euros in the 2022 budgets.
Later, with Law 12/2022, the new simplified employment plans were created and companies, public administrations, self-employed associations and labor cooperative societies were suggested as responsible for promoting them. The public entity assumes this role through these public promotion plans, partially supervised by the State, although the management and deposit fall on financial firms, which aspire to reinforce the second pillar. With all the ends tied up and the contract foreseeably placed before the end of the electoral campaign, all the elements seem aligned to start working, regardless of whether or not there will be a replacement at the head of the Executive.
The Popular Party leads the polls for the electoral contest and has avoided pronouncing too much about these savings modalities, to highlight that they will link the rise in public pensions to the CPI. However, the formation led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo does admit its intention to raise the deductible contributions to private pension plans, although they rule out doing so automatically and believe that it would be appropriate to raise them with some progressiveness. The sources of the economic team of the candidacy showed that the “logical” thing would be to equalize the advantages of the individual and collective plans, but they would avoid detailing how the incentives would be specified.
