Ms Jenny Connors:

We obviously do analysis on replacement rates as well as the distributional analysis to inform the budget. I cannot think of the year off the top of my head, but we have done a number of papers to look at the replacement rates, work incentives and what we can model with regard to social welfare, HAP and medical cards. I believe that analysis was published as part of the spending review process in 2017 or 2018 and a paper was done before that. We definitely monitor it. The policy area is for the Departments of Social Protection and Health but it is something we look at ourselves. We carry out that analysis through the spending review process. A good example of that was probably through Covid and some of the work that was done around the work incentives with the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP. As we have seen, many of those people went back to work and transitioned back into employment. It does not seem to be an issue there but much of the work in replacement rate analysis was done to inform that.