The Senate majority supports the law: in addition to the coalition parties VVD, D66, CDA and ChristenUnie, the bill has received the support of PvdA, GroenLinks and SGP. This provides the legal basis for one of the greatest social reforms of recent times.
“And there was joy, because it was a marathon session in both the House of Representatives and the Senate,” Beekman says. And there were also many discussions yesterday, even after the criticisms of SP MP Tiny Kox. “He says it’s an amendment to the constitution and it requires a two-thirds majority, which it doesn’t have,” Beekman says. In the end, Minister Schouten said that this is a technical amendment and therefore no constitutional amendment is needed.
After the vote in the Senate, Minister Schouten said that this law guarantees a good pension for current and future generations. Pension funds have until 2028 to implement all changes. That deadline was originally set for 2027. “The expectation is that entry into the new system will take longer,” says Beekman. “So Schouten added a year to it. But the law will go into effect on July 1 this year.’
Labor unions
Now that the new pension law has been adopted, FNV wants to work quickly on structural arrangements so that people with heavy jobs can retire on time. “As FNV, we will work hard on this,” said President Tuur Elzinga.
According to Elzinga, the support in the Senate for the law that should form the basis of the new pension system is “an important step” in the elaboration of the pension agreement that the unions concluded with the employers in 2019. But he points out that the pension funds they still have a lot of work to do in the next few years.
“With the new law in hand, pension funds can design retirement more transparently and fairly and choose to share risks collectively even more effectively,” Elzinga says. “This makes indexing faster.”