The government will not raise the national insurance contribution or the retirement age, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told a packed Labour Party club in Għargħur, yesterday.

Dr Muscat was speaking at a political activity ahead of the upcoming local council elections on April 11. The official electoral campaign kicks off on Sunday.

The club was so full thatpeople crowded the pavement and the road outside.

Expressing surprise at the turnout, Dr Muscat said he hoped that on April 11, people would show support for the Labour movement and the party.

“We need to work to get a majority, as small as it is,” he said, noting that midterm elections were the most challenging.

“These two years were not perfect but they saw very big social and economic changes,” he added.

These two years were not perfect but they sawvery big social and economic changes

Referring to childcare centres, he said fulltime working parents were saving €6,000 a year through the free service.

This was one of the big social and economic reforms that will go down in history, he said, adding this could be compared to similar events like the introduction of pensions, minimum wage and maternity leave.

Free childcare services were not introduced as a stand-alone initiative, Dr Muscat said, but as part of a plan to increase the number of people in employment.

“We want to solve the problem of pensions through children. The current pension is not enough. In the past grandparents used to hand out pocket money to their grandchildren, but now the elderly have to be helped out financially by their own children. That means there is something wrong and we will solve it by getting more people to work.

“We will not raise the retirement age. This would be the easy way out. We will not increase the national insurance contribution,” he added, insisting the solution was to increase the number of employed people.

He also referred to his visit on Tuesday to the Maltapost offices in Marsa, where he met young people benefiting from the Youth Guarantee Scheme, through which youth unemployment had been slashed.