The self-employed may have to be forced to save for their pensions and employers should have more say in how much they contribute to employees’ pensions, the Dutch financial regulator AFM says in a report published on Tuesday.

The AFM report is the regulator’s vision on pensions in the future and it says the present system is not flexible enough and does not take into account individual differences.

‘Not everyone has the same pension needs,’ the AFM’s Harman Korte told the Financieele Dagblad. ‘Someone who has savings in a house may have a very different pension requirement than someone living in rented accommodation,’ he said.

Of the roughly one million self-employed in the Netherlands, at least 100,000 are known not to be building up a pension and they are not required to do so, according to the AFM. Consequently the AFM wants to make pension savings compulsory for the self-employed.

‘It is inexplicable that some working people are required to save for their pension and others are not,’ Korte told the FD.

Solidarity

The AFM report follows remarks made last year by the most senior civil servant in the economic affairs ministry, who told the Volkskrant that the number of self-employed without private pensions is putting pressure on the traditional Dutch institutions of collectivity and solidarity.

The relationship between employer and worker is changing, Maarten Camps said. The labour market of the future requires a system that encourages, rather than impedes, mobility. This new approach could be based on a compulsory collective system covering all workers – both employees and freelancers. ‘Everyone would pay premiums to the collective invalidity and pension schemes,’ he told the Volkskrant in an interview.