Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the second part of his request, the Deputy table a parliamentary question today and he would have the information to which he refers next Tuesday.

On the first part, I say to the Deputy, to everyone else who has contributed and to Deputy O'Dea who tabled the amendment , that it really would be a valuable piece of work and should be done. I ask Deputy O'Dea to reflect on what he stated in respect of the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill. I did not say - I hope to God that nobody told him I said - that I would not bring the Bill to the Seanad unless the section to which his amendment to that Bill gave rise was removed. As I stated at the end of the summer when the amendment was accepted by the House, it is my view that I would not bring the Bill to the Seanad until I had completed comprehensive of work in respect of self-employment and bogus self-employment, particularly as these are issues I am very serious about tackling on a number of levels.

In recent years, the Government has sought to equalise the offerings of the schemes that are available from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection for people who are employed and those who are self-employed in order to provide equality of access across all of our schemes for employees and for the self-employed. We have gone a long way towards doing that this year with the introduction of jobseeker's benefit for the self-employed. The last outstanding measure is illness benefit for self-employed people. I hope do something about that next year. It is a testament to how much this section of society responds that when I come to the Dáil next week with the Department's Revised Estimate, Members will be able to see - positively I hope - that the one area of my budget in which I am overspending is that relating to treatment benefits. This is due to the tens of thousands of self-employed people who have come forward - over and above the numbers we thought would - in order to avail of the dental, aural and optical benefits we put in place in the budgets for last year and the previous year.

We know these people are out there and we know that when we look after them and provide parity of access, they take it on board. I also know that the industry is rife with people who are being maligned. There is a cohort of people who qualify and who want to be self-employed, and that is great. Yes there is a loss to the Exchequer but we can deal with that another day. There are vulnerable people in certain sectors and industries, which we can all name, who are being manipulated and maligned. They are losing employment rights. They are losing wages for the days for which they are not being paid. They are losing holiday entitlements and much of the time they are losing quality time with their families because they are being told when they have to work and they do not actually have the freedom that real self-employment should provide for people. A huge body of work needs to be done and I will do it.

The Deputy asked Deputy Brady to withdraw two of his amendments in the spirit of goodwill in order to give me six months to compile the reports. However, Deputies O'Dea and Curran have added three requests for reports and included three-month timeframes for all of them. Notwithstanding that I am privileged to work with an entirely professional body of civil servants, they are not infinite in number and they are the same people - in the main - who the Deputies ask to compile the same reports year in and year out. I will tell the Deputies that I will compile this report, but there is not a snowball's chance in hell that it will be completed in three months. I can accept the amendment today, which is no problem, but I am not going to adhere to the three-month period because it is just not physically possible. I would end up giving the chairman of the committee a report that is not worth anything. It would not be meaningful. If we, as a Parliament, are to address this issue in a serious manner, the research has to be sound and we must have exact, measured data in order that we can implement the legislation to provide the protections for the people who are being made vulnerable and to ensure that tax is collected from those who are avoiding it otherwise.

The vast majority of employers are good but the scope section of my Department recognised that there are some who are not. This is why we changed our practices this year in order to have proactive inspections. We are targeting specific industries including security, construction, deliveries and hairdressing. There are so many sections of society that need to be inspected.

I am happy to accept the amendment. However, when we have this conversation - which has happened frequently in respect of this Bill and during the debate on the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill - people inform me that they have buckets of anecdotal evidence. When I ask for referrals from the Members they never, ever arrive. They do not make it into the scope section either. I reiterate that if Members know of vulnerable people who they believe are being made to declare themselves as being self-employed, then they give the details to me and I will investigate. Without factual evidence, however, I can do nothing except look at general data. If we do not have tangible results in specific areas arising from inspections performed by my Department, then all we will ever have is anecdotal evidence and we will still be talking about this matter in ten years' time, when the world of work has changed completely and when precarious types of employment that we have not yet even thought of will have been created. We will still be looking backwards and trying to reflect on how to make it better.

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