A new factor of sustainability, the great stumbling block for the next Toledo Pact

A new factor of sustainability, the great stumbling block for the next Toledo Pact

After the failure of this commission to reach an agreement, the PP announced that now it will require to introduce this reductive mechanism

  The new Covenant of Toledo that is settled after the elections of April 28 will not have anything easy. After the failure of the current parliamentary committee , which has not been able to achieve the consensus that had been reached on three previous occasions since its founding in 1995, the spirits have become too much and the division embodied in these last days can also make a dent for those who come.

  In addition, all assume that the group responsible for making recommendations that strengthen and make the pension system sustainable will have at least one new member: Vox , a party that will surely disembark for the first time in the Congress of Deputies. This may mean that the high degree of consensus that had been achieved in most of the issues dealt with -something in which almost all the groups coincide despite the fact that last Tuesday, Podemos, was taken down with a kind of amendment to the whole- has not served for a lot.

The great stumbling block that the new commission will have to face will be whether or not to implement a new sustainability factor , something that did not appear in the current draft, despite the fact that one of the demands of the left and the trade unions is the total derogation of this trimming mechanism introduced by Mariano Rajoy in the pension reform of 2013 and that should have come into effect this year. However, just before the motion of censure that threw Rajoy, the PP had agreed with the PNV its postponement until 2023.

Now the popular will demand to introduce a new factor of sustainability as an essential element for the future of pensions, as announced last Tuesday the spokesman of this group in the Pact of Toledo, Gerardo Camps, after the meeting that staged the failure of this commission. The one that appears in the last reform supposes a cut of about 75 Euros to the year for the new retired ones when automatically linking the new benefit to the life expectancy in that moment. The reasoning is simple: as the future pensioners will live longer, they will have to distribute the quoted rights during their working life between a greater number of years.

"Today we were going to put on the table that we wanted to expressly collect the factor of sustainability in the legal age of retirement because we did not want to find ourselves with the unpleasant surprise that with a Royal Decree just before the elections the Socialist Government also repealed the sustainability factor is postponed », warned who was Secretary of State for Social Security, referring to the possibility that the Executive approve a Royal Decree on the reform of pensions, mainly to introduce by law a new formula of revaluation linked to the IPC, something that they see unlikely from the department of Magdalena Valerio but that they do not rule out yet.

Against, Podemos and PSOE

The possibility of implementing a new sustainability factor would run head-on with Podemos and PSOE, which have always maintained their opposite position in this committee. On the contrary, Cuidadanos and PDeCAT could accept it if, as in their day, the Catalan deputy Carles Campuzano defended, it was linked not with the amount of the pension but with the retirement age , that is, a mechanism that served to delay the withdrawal but that does not involve a cut in the payroll, as the current one does.

Another one of the defenders of which there is some type of factor of sustainability is the still secretary of State of the Social Security, Octavio Granado , that in more than one occasion has been in favor of this element. The last time, just over a month ago, when he said in a meeting with journalists that "we do not consider the sustainability factor dead, but we are not going to implement measures that reduce the pensioner's initial pension". And he justified that "the increase in life expectancy has costs that the system has to assume". However, he rejected that it is "a polynomial formula that translates into a person receiving less from the beginning regardless of the age at which he retires" and advocated "more flexible formulas" that adapt to the different collective.