Dr. Laura Bambrick:

Our preference is that the legislation would have a requirement for the Minister to consult with the social partners on an annual basis about things. Ms McElwee highlighted much of the potential around how this Bill will interact over at least the next four years as it is gradually introduced. It will be important to look ahead. Hopefully, we are pre-empting much of this now. Once this gets out into the field, many things will arise and it will be important there is an opportunity in this regard, rather than us of each separately having to lobby the Minister to say that something is an issue. For example, we might find that some workers will be worse off than they would have been if they had got the illness benefit after day four. We want to make sure that there are no unintended consequences. It is not the intention of congress to see employers who moved early and established good company policies being in any way penalised by this legislation. That would be a big concern. Equally, bogus self-employment, which was mentioned earlier, would be a concern.

For some people the 70% replacement rate will be a disappointment. However, we are comparing it to the replacement rates in European countries that have had those schemes in place for decades, and some for centuries. The schemes we are looking at today did not exist from day one. The really important part of this legislation is it is putting in place the principle that employers are responsible for their workers for a fixed period of time if a worker is too sick to work. We can look at tinkering around the edges and hopefully improving the scheme in terms of replacement rates, the timing and the certified and non-certified days as it progresses. We think it is important, especially in the four years as the scheme is rolled out, that there is a commitment that the social partners will be listened to and our opinions taken into account, even if it is done through this committee.