Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Regarding Deputy Butler's general point which we have discussed a number of times previously, I thank him for acknowledging that, contrary to popular myth, many people who are self-employed get access to social welfare. Almost all the 100,000 people who lost their jobs, particularly as a consequence of the collapse of the construction industry, ended up being self-employed in one way or another with the changes in construction during the height of the boom. We have given almost all of those people access to social welfare protection.

The other issue that affects people in that situation is that their partners may be working. That would reduce the level of support they would get from this Department but the chairperson of the Advisory Group on Tax and Social Welfare was at pains to point out that self-employed people do well. The actuarial report on the Social Insurance Fund stated specifically that 4% of self-employed people get access to retirement pensions and to widow's, widower's and survivor's pensions. That is the best value for money in the social insurance scheme.

The critical issue, and this is something that is a judgment call, is that an employed person, between him or her and the employer, is contributing 14.75%. A self-employed person currently contributes only 4%. We may be able to move to getting self-employed people to contribute more to get specific benefits but we will have to cover the costs. Would people currently self-employed do that?

I strongly agree with Deputy Butler. I know many people who became self-employed during the construction boom. There was never a thought, understandably because they were working all the hours God sent, about whether they should be paying PRSI and a full stamp, to use the old terminology. It was only when the boom ended that they suddenly found they did not have the protection of unemployment or jobseeker's benefit or allowances. The question is whether people could afford to move to a higher level of contribution and the level at which that should be set. There would also be other ways of mitigating that. With self-employed people being very resourceful, their benefit periods might be more restricted.

I received the report recently and we are examining it in detail. In any report on social welfare we have to examine the cost factors involved in introducing it, what people would be charged, and the benefits they would get. We would then have to examine the system's implementation; I think the fancy name for it in the Department is the business process implementation plan. It often means that many changes to IT are required to take account of it, and we have to plan in that regard. We are looking at both of those and I will revert to the committee when we have had an opportunity to examine how we would go about doing this, the implications for the individual and the Department's budget, and the IT business systems that would be required to do it.