Dr. Laura Bambrick:

I will qualify my answer by saying I am not involved in industrial relations and unfortunately my colleague who would be better able to answer this, is dealing with the State pension at the moment. As Ms McElwee mentioned earlier, trade unions are very supportive when there is genuine abuse happening because these have to date been voluntary arrangements by the employer and so we wanted to see these schemes work both for good worker-employer relations but also to protect the sustainability of the scheme. I will also point to other international research. The findings are somewhat paradoxical. They show that the more generous a sick pay scheme is, the fewer waiting days, the higher the replacement rate cost, the easier it is to access it with those uncertified days, and the less absenteeism we see. It sounds contradictory, that if one gives people easier access to paid days off, the expectation might be that they might abuse it and take the time. What the research finds when it digs down is that it allows people to take days off when they have a minor ailment and it stops the condition festering into something more serious that a longer spell of absenteeism is needed to recuperate. This is what we have seen during the outbreaks of Covid-19. People had minor coughs and colds, were not sure if it was Covid-19 and took the gamble to go to work because they did not have the safeguard of a sick pay scheme, and within that time whole companies had to be shut down. Real research exists which says that a generous scheme can be more beneficial and less costly than being very tight about who can access it and the terms under which they can access it.