Mr. John McKeon:

I think I have been consistent at this committee and at the social protection committee. The claim that was made dates back to the late 1990s or early 2000s, which is long before I was in the Department. It refers to a time when the then Secretary General, in response to pressure from trade unionists and others about how to classify people as employed or self-employed, asked that a project be done to identify the factors that would give rise to a person being either self-employed or employed. The courier sector was used as an example. The five factors I spoke about earlier were derived from that and from the prior legal cases. There was a famous case - the Denny case - about people in supermarkets demonstrating foods and so on. The five factors were identified and the first code of practice in terms of determining employment status was agreed with the trade union partners, as one of the partners to the partnership agreements at the time. Test cases were used to identify the factors rather then determine the outcomes for any individual. That has been and is still my position. In my tenure as Secretary General of the Department, I have never seen a situation where a whole sector of employment or a whole occupational group was determined based on test cases. In my ability to trawl through records going back more than 20 years, I have not seen an example of it. I asked if somebody could give me an example. In the case I mentioned before, there are many couriers in the country who are classified as employees. We employ people as service officers to work as couriers in our Department and they are employees. Some of the big courier companies-----