Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Senator's deep interest in these matters. If it would be helpful, I will send him the metrics tracked by the Companies Registration Office, CRO. To be fair to that office, it has cut the number of days involved in the process of setting up a business and increased the percentage of interactions that can be completed online. The progress in this regard is very impressive. The Revenue Commissioners, meanwhile, comes out as one of the best, if not the very best, in the world when it comes to ease of complying with the corporate taxation process and so on. I will ask the new head of the CRO for a report on what more could be done to move the process online. Between now and June, a major effort is being made to familiarise people with the new company set-up process. People will have to, over 18 months, opt for one or other of the new company structures. As a consequence, there will be something of a peak in work as we try to migrate people from the old, more bureaucratic system to the newer, simpler one. We might have to accept a slight blip in the numbers because of that large body of work, but it will be well worthwhile. The Senator has been very consistent on this issue and we will seek to come back to him on it.

The consolidation of legislation is a hugely complex process. We have put through the Bill to establish the Workplace Relations Commission and I thank Deputies and Senators for their patience in working with us on it. They saw how complex that legislation was and it did not involve a consolidation of labour law, which is a project that remains to be done. Consolidation is important in the longer term, but it can be very grinding work. One of our priorities was to have the consumer and competition agencies merged.

We wanted to have Forfás integrated into the Department and create a new dynamo in Shannon to drive the whole region. We wanted to get our workplace relations scheme up being to world class, with a much more efficient way of doing things. This has taken priority, if one likes, over the sweeping out of the attic of old laws and regulations. However, I take the Senator's point and the matter is certainly on my agenda.

The lack of language skills is a real problem. We have a competence in languages. From memory, approximately 38,000 students take languages in their leaving certificate examinations, obviously excluding Irish and English, which is a substantial part of the total cohort. While we have a significant number who have language competence, they do not appear to be able to fill some of the positions for which one needs a language. They do not speak the language and this appears to be a problem in meeting many of the language requirements of businesses. Where people have a reasonable competence to speak German, French or Spanish, with sales or technical capability, we are definitely setting targets to improve in this regard. Acquiring language skills is a longer term project and probably is within the education system. The aforementioned figure of 38,000 is not a bad number and it is probably a question of increasing the competence level of those 38,000 people to a level at which they could do more with the language.

As for small company exemptions, obviously they will be introduced this year with the Companies Act on the audit side, while the accountancy directive will have measures on the audit side. However, if we were to dilute labour rights for companies below a certain size, the Government would rightly be excoriated for so doing by Deputies Peadar Tóibín, John Lyons and others. There are some rights one cannot reduce by virtue of a company being small. It is difficult to identify measures if they are related to a company's size - audit being a good example - but if there are practical examples from the French, I would certainly be open to considering them. There is a limited amount of crowdfunding, an issue on which a group from the Departments of Finance and Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation - the SME State bodies group - is working. I must obtain a report for the Senator on the progress it has made. Nothing made it this year into the legislative programme and while some would like to see tax advantages, they did not make the cut. However, it is certainly an idea to which we can be open. In other countries it is a small but interesting area. While it is not massive, it is one we definitely must keep in mind.

The question of upward-only rent reviews comes down to constitutional change. Were one to cut the rent paid to people who might themselves have debts, it is clear one would have to compensate them. With all of the other obligations taxpayers are trying to meet, taking up the slack for high rents simply has not been affordable. The Government has looked to the market to adjust and while I accept that it has not always adjusted, there has also been a good deal of progress in this regard.

I believe those are the issues which were raised.