Mr. Koos Richelle:

I thank members for their questions. To answer the Chairman's question, it is very appealing to introduce many indicators but this makes the matter very complex. A deliberate choice has been made to limit the indicators and those we define as most important. These are only indicators on a scoreboard and to better understand the issue the Employment Committee and the Social Protection Committee uses existing analysis mechanisms. These are the social protection and employment performance monitors. These give much more detail on what is wrong. The indicators as such only give the total picture. The performance monitors operated by the two committees show what will happen which makes it possible to make detailed country specific recommendations further down the road.

If there is not enough participation in the labour market one might see, through later analysis, it is specifically a lack of female participation, which is why specific recommendations are made to many countries to promote female labour participation, which may involve increasing child care facilities. Further down the road we get more specific but the more indicators put on the scoreboard the less clear it is when one must act on the main issues to start a policy change. This is the reason for the limitation of indicators and I must confess it was a struggle to include them all.

Unemployment inequalities have been acceptable in the main macroeconomic thinking but there has been a big discussion about gross domestic disposable household income and poverty. A difficulty is that poverty statistics are issued after a delay of two years, and it is very difficult to interpret the exact level of poverty in a household because one must take into account all social benefits and allowances, and most countries with an elaborated system of social allowances have difficulty in seeing the received by a family. Basing a system on primary income from labour does not give a good idea of what is really happening in a family. This set of indicators is just a proposal and must be accepted by the Council. The political debate is on.

Deputy Murphy asked about labour mobility and loss of skills. I use the term "loss of skills" to indicate those who are long-term unemployed may lose their attractiveness for the labour market and may not update their skills. The element the Deputy raised is certainly relevant. Some countries recruit science, technology, engineering, mathematics and mechanics workers from third countries. This means the labour mobility does not function properly in the Internal Market because people with the same skills in other member states may not be hired for jobs and the vacancies are filled by people from third countries. We are focused on labour mobility to ensure the labour potential available in Europe has the maximum chance of being exploited.

We see in the framework of globalisation that enterprises move quite easily. Ireland has had experience of big companies coming here first before moving further east because labour is cheaper there. In our Europe 2020 strategy we have pleaded with member states to examine deep and structural reforms of economies linked with globalisation and the aging of populations. These elements have subsided in the crisis, but they are still very relevant. I have always said one of the most discouraging aspects is to hear somebody saying he or she wishes the crisis were over in order that things could pick up where had left off. I always say, "Dream on, honey," as in the meantime the worlds has changed dramatically and every country must position itself towards globalisation.

We are working on the issue of pensions and I hope next week we will see a compromise from the trialogue taking place between the Parliament, the Council and the Commission. We have made some progress in the past few days, but this must be confirmed in formal meetings of the trialogue. The co-ordination of social security issues has been ongoing for years and it is a standing issue. Famously, there is Regulation 883 which is quite extensive in regard to co-ordination. There is a big difference between social security built on the basis of premiums and social allowances which are non-contributory. These allowances do not fall under the co-ordination of social security and there is proof that in many national legislative frameworks the entitlements to them raise big problems. Some are exportable and some are not and there is no agreement between member states in this area. We have also seen the development of hybrid forms of payments that include a bit of social security and a bit of a social allowance. In these cases the European court is always inclined to give maximum protection to the individual and consider everything to be social security. There is much better regulation and co-ordination in social security than in the case of social assistance which is considered to be linked with the fiscal domain of every national government.

Recently there have been many debates concerning welfare tourism, with inactive people moving to other countries because they prefer the health system or the allowances they can get in these countries. We are producing facts and figures demonstrating that this is a negligible burden for state budgets currently. We will keep a close eye on the matter as in some countries it is a political balloon and presented as a major problem. We have not been able to detect the problem, but we have asked the member states concerned to give us information or photos for the problem areas in order that we could detect them. Unfortunately or, perhaps, fortunately we did not get much of a response in that regard.

For a number of years we have made country-specific recommendations. For example, in one country with a surplus - Germany - there is the issue of in-work poverty. There is a system of mini-jobs in that country which sometimes do not provide enough money for people to survive on, particularly if it takes a long time to get out of that job and into a normally paid job.