Dr. Karina Doorley:

We are not expecting prices to come down. We are expecting inflation to level off but we will still have this higher price level. The fact that social welfare payments in particular have been topped up by one-off payments for a couple of years means that if and when the adjustment comes - we would be greatly in favour of it coming - it will be larger than it otherwise would have been. It will need to be a large change next year if we are to catch up on those losses. Our suggestion is for there to be a benchmarking exercise. That can take many forms. The last benchmarking exercise took place well over a decade ago. Policymakers decided that in order to reflect an adequate standard of living, this payment should be approximately 30%, 40% or whatever percentage of a particular metric. In the intervening years, successive budgets have tended to increase the rate of these payments by €5 or €10, or sometimes not to increase them, on an almost ad hocbasis. The rate of increase from year to year has not necessarily related to the rate of payment. Pensioners in receipt of higher payments may have received the same increase as people on the lower rate of jobseeker's assistance, which is a much lower rate. The rate at which the payments were set initially is diverging almost accidentally from what was considered the correct standard of living at the time. We need to get back to something like that, where we purposely set the rates of payment to a level where we expect people to have a decent standard of living. We are in favour of some sort of indexation mechanism where policymakers at least compare what the actual changes will be to an index baseline to ascertain what the changes look like compared with the situation if people's purchasing power had simply been kept constant.