Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To answer Deputy Mac Lochlainn's question around the impact of the census postponement on the EU regulation, under the Framework Regulation of the Council and the Parliament Ireland is required to transmit census data to EUROSTAT with a reference date in 2021 and this transition must be made by March 2024. The CSO is working closely with EUROSTAT to mitigate the impact of the changed census date and will consider the introduction of additional methodologies and data sources in order to satisfy all EUROSTAT's requirement.

On the Deputy's question around engagement between the CSO and the HSE, I understand there has been extensive engagement in relation to contact tracing and around the utilisation of field officers, as the Deputy has referenced and which is a constructive suggestion. I will ask my officials to send the Deputy a detailed note on that. On the public health response, we need to have all pillars of the State trying to support contact tracing, particularly when there is an escalation of the epidemiological position on how we can respond to it.

In response to Deputy Boyd Barrett, I agree that we should use next year. We should always use every occasion to look at all our data sources to inform public policy objectives and the CSO has not in any way stopped doing that. It is continuing its work and its regular reporting to Government and its public reports and its data sources are a key objective in public policy and in responding to the changing needs of society as the Deputy referenced. Perhaps next year there will be additional time to do that when the census is not happening. I will bring the Deputy's feedback to the CSO in that regard.

In response to Deputy Tóibín, the CSO annual business demography figures indicate that there were 270,300 enterprises in the private business economy in 2018. Of these, some 269,700 were small and medium-sized enterprises, 248,300 of which had less than ten persons engaged and 21,400 of which employed between ten and 249 people.

Between April and August this year, the CSO collected and published six waves of its Business Impact of COVID-19 Survey to provide insights into the impact of the pandemic on businesses. The result of wave six of the survey indicated that an estimated 2.5% of enterprises had ceased trading temporarily while 1.2% had ceased trading permanently at the end of August.

The survey also asked businesses how confident they were in being able to continue trading. It found that 3.4% of enterprises were only confident of having the resources to continue trading for another month and 1.6% were not confident of having the resources to continue trading.

Annual statistics on business demography are compiled with a considerable time lag as they depend on processed tax-return data which enterprises may submit to the Revenue Commissioners up to 11 months after the reference year to submit. To provide early information about the situation in 2020, the CSO is currently developing a business signs-of-life analysis which will link Covid-19 related support payments and other administrative data to the business demography statistics to identify how many businesses are continuing to trade. The first report by the CSO on business signs of life will focus on the effect on business of employee-related supports, such as the pandemic unemployment payment and the wage support schemes. The CSO aims to publish this report in December and to follow it up with reports on the numbers of businesses which are continuing to trade. The CSO is also preparing to collect a larger-scale business impact of Covid-19 survey in January 2021 which will provide structural information on the impacts of the crisis on businesses throughout 2020.

There have been significant supports in the context of budget 2021, for example, the reduced VAT rate for the hospitality and tourism sector from 13.5% to 9%, the commercial rates waiver for Q4 of 2020, the 9,000 upskilling and reskilling opportunities and the extraordinary expenditure response around Covid-19 and the horizontal supports that are there in terms of the wage subsidy schemes. That support will be ongoing to support our SMEs. We are happy to provide further data to the Deputy from the CSO related to his question.

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