Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I strongly advise caution on the Minister's proposal to have the working group receive submissions from workers and employers who are actually in the system, rather than having those people represented within the group. I will tell the Minister why. In 1992, in a previous Government, I was a Minister of State at the then Department of Social Welfare. At that point, it was on the menu to try to have more integration and interface between PRSI and taxation. The Minister is at risk of just taking into account public service employees in terms of how the system operates, and not fully including people who are operating on the other side of the system. The system is so varied because of employment and self-employment situations nowadays.

I look forward to that report being published. Neither the Taoiseach nor the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection indicated today that it was going to be any time soon. I think it is an awful pity. It is one area of the system where a lot of the people in this room, particularly those on the official and the tax side, know that we are being taken to the cleaners by employers who are creating structures where people have to opt in to self-employment. No matter how much the Government expands benefits for the self-employed, on a cost basis it will not be able to expand them to the point where somebody gets the same level of benefits as if they were in employment, particularly if that employment turns out to be sporadic, maybe for three or five years, and there are breaks in it because of ups and downs in the economy and so on.

In terms of the working group, might the Minister agree down the line, when the Finance Bill has been passed, to publish a paper laying out his thoughts on that? This kind of change is very important. I am conscious of the fact that quite a number of countries have moved from what was in effect a contributory system with a lot of benefits which are relatively clear - although they are not always clear. We might follow other jurisdictions and actually move to a much more means tested system, which would mean that a lot of people would not get the contributions for the principal retirement pension to which they felt they had contributed.