Dr. Mark Cassidy:

Apologies, I misunderstood. The distress on households has been mitigated even more than the supports. We published something on this in recent weeks and it shows that average household incomes actually increased last year. There were two reasons for that. First, a large part of the population are not affected directly by the crisis and, in fact, average incomes for that part of the population generally increased. More remarkable has been the effect of the Government income supports. Particularly for lower income workers and younger workers, the supports received from the wage subsidy scheme and the pandemic unemployment payment have significantly reduced the financial hardship, although not in all cases and there have still been some income cuts among some parts.

I have some figures to hand. Generally, if there had not been income supports, average incomes last year across the board would have declined by about 6% but, in fact, average incomes increased by about 4%. Among younger workers, the effect was even greater.