15 October 2013

IPE: France's Chamber of Deputies set to embrace pensions reform

The new reform – part of president François Hollande's plan to tackle the budget deficit, which could reach up to €20.7 billon by 2020 according to official data – is to be adopted by the Chamber of Deputies before the pension act is sent to the Senate for final approval.

French MPs will vote on the country's new pensions reform, which seeks to further extend the length of contributions, increase social contributions and introduce special accounts for "hardship conditions" at work. Among the measures agreed, one aims to extend the length of contributions from the current 41.5 years to 43 years by 2035. Additionally, employers and employees will see their social contributions increase over the next four years – by 0.15 percentage points in 2014 and 0.05 percentage points in 2015, 2016 and 2017 – to reach an overall increase of 0.3 percentage points by 2017.

Hollande's government announced a new set of measures to reform the French first-pillar pension system at the end of August, after it received a report from a pensions advisory panel. This government convened the panel after a report from the pension steering committee, the Conseil d'Orientation des Retraites (COR), argued in December last year that the previous pension reform introduced in 2010 would fail to tackle France's deficit by 2018, as previously expected.

In its final report sent to the government in June, the pensions advisory panel recommended a further increase in the period of contributions, tax rises for pensioners and an increase in the level of contributions. Additionally, the panel recommended a limit on the indexation of pensions, which would lead the most wealthy retirees, already paying as much as 6.8 per cent of general social contribution (CSG) in tax, see their pensions fall by 1 percentage point compared with inflation.

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