Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to welcome the Bill on genuine progress indicators which are the only way to measure the well-being of a nation and its people. Until now, we have had ad hocand partial responses in looking at budget time at the brief impact of national economic and budgetary policy but not in the profound ways proposed in the Bill. The Committee on Budgetary Oversight, of which I am a member, has commenced a study of gender equality budgeting. The basic programme of action in this area which is being pursued by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform offers an opportunity to finally have a serious gender equality impact analysis of each budget from budget 2018 onwards. We are targeting budget 2019, in particular, with reference to areas such as child care and encouraging more young women to take up apprenticeships and so on. I have requested - the committee has agreed to my request - that a disability impact analysis be promoted and monitored in respect of budget 2019. In the coming weeks the committee will be meeting Senator John Dolan who chairs the Oireachtas disability group, of which I am also a member, and other leading advocates in the disability sector.

As I stated, there have been very cursory attempts in the past to poverty-proof budgets. Essentially, they amounted to public relations exercises. Budget expenditure books generally included two or three pages of poorly researched data to try to put forward the idea that even draconian austerity budgets were somehow fair.

Indeed, Deputy Howlin, as former Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, will be familiar with those from the past. There was never a serious effort to estimate the often vicious impacts of budgetary decreases on the most vulnerable sectors of our community, who went through a lot of suffering. I recall, for example as a Labour Party energy spokesperson in the past, developing policies to address energy poverty, but there was poor statistical and research data on this crucial aspect of poverty although every year people’s lives were shortened by energy poverty. There was no proper appreciation on the part of Government of this huge area in poverty, particularly for senior citizens.

We also had the phenomenon of the green impact analysis of budgets when the Green Party was in power with Fianna Fáil, the headings of which are echoed in section 2 of this Bill under environmental accounts. The then Minister, John Gormley, came into the House and gave a pointless review of mostly green aspirations which Fianna Fáil had no intention of fulfilling. That Government, of course, led the country into a terrible crash.

During the 2011-2016 austerity Government, led by Fine Gael, I introduced the High Pay and Wealth Commission Bill 2014. The Bill sought to establish a nine-person commission within the Central Statistics Office, CSO, whose task would be to regularly inform the public about levels of wealth and income across Irish society. Data collection and compilation on income and wealth were the starting point and the Bill was inspired by states such as Norway where everybody’s income and level of taxable wealth is freely available to all citizens. Any citizen can find out what the wealth and income is of any other citizen. The Minister at the time, Deputy Noonan, thought the proposal astonishing and hilarious.

The commission I proposed was to engage in research on best practice models of income distribution, which echoes in the first table in Deputy Howlin's Bill under economic accounts. It was to seek to determine an appropriate structure in which the awarding of executive high pay and other remuneration may be reformed. The Bill was aimed at outrageous executive high pay, notably of bankers and bosses in the construction sector, who paid themselves millions of euro per annum. That Bill went much further towards enabling a fairer and more equal society than Deputy Howlin’s Bill before us today but the general approach in Deputy Howlin’s legislation is a useful starting point for what my 2014 legislation was seeking to achieve. Sadly, of course, the High Pay and Wealth Commission Bill 2014 was strongly rejected by the then Minister, Deputy Noonan, Deputy Howlin’s former colleague, and the Bill was voted down by the Fine Gael-led austerity Government.

Legislating for the concept of genuine progress indicators in section 2 of the Bill, or socioeconomic indicators, would be a valuable step forward to move towards a more egalitarian society. Deputy Howlin has given useful examples in section 2(2) of the areas which would be key genuine progress indicators for national distributional accounts. At the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, of course, we have grappled with the problems of measuring GNP and GDP, especially after the incredible statistical jump in 2015. The new GNI* index seeks to address some of the volatility caused by multinational capital and knowledge movements but even GNI* is only a very broad and tentative measure of Ireland’s economic performance. Indeed, it was interesting today to read Kieran McQuinn of ESRI saying that a totally new index was necessary to measure underlying growth in the Irish economy, never mind move to the kind of analysis in which this Bill rightly asks us to engage, given the distortions of the part caused by our large multinational sector.

The collection of much better data on citizen’s livelihoods, including household savings and expenditure, would be an important step forward. The inclusion of transport infrastructure is also useful and it was interesting to hear Deputy Cassells speaking about transport links to County Meath to serve the growing population in the county. The big lacuna, however, in the suggested list for economic accounts is housing. Did the last two austerity Governments carry out any cost-effectiveness analysis of the total shutting down of social and public housing, and the problems the huge backlog in social housing has caused? Any such cost-effective analysis would have shown that the future personal and social costs were staggering and far overshadowed arrangements made to finance the outrageous blanket bank guarantee.

The suggested social and human health accounts would also be very helpful. Fr. Seán Healy and Social Justice Ireland have drawn our attention to how badly Ireland is performing on a range of UN-backed indicators covering the economy, environment and society. Social Justice Ireland’s sustainable progress index 2018 highlights how poorly Ireland has performed on low pay, long-term unemployment, household debt and greenhouse gas emissions, so the metrics outlined under social and human health accounts are very important.

Deputy Howlin's second list of useful indicators, the social and human wealth accounts, are very valuable, particularly in relation to unpaid work and the work of carers, who do a huge amount of work which society barely recognises in GDP or GNI figures. Road traffic accidents are included under the human capital, health and wellness heading and I have a particular interest in this. Indeed, I am pursuing reforming legislation to bring about Vision Zero for road transport. The huge impact on people's lives from the maladministration of traffic law has a negative impact on society. The environmental accounts, the environmental footprint analysis, the natural capital accounts and the ecosystem services to which the Deputy refers are also very valuable.

The Genuine Progress Indicators and National Distributional Accounts Bill 2017 is an important Bill and it would give a useful remit to statisticians in our national organisations to pursue certain indicators. In other countries, especially Scandinavia, they have experience of monitoring areas which impact on citizens' lives and it would be right to do the same in this country. We would then be able to frame national economic and budgetary policy from a standpoint of real knowledge of how our people are living.

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