Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Kelly for his comments. Two schemes are commonly mentioned. One is the supplementary welfare allowance, which Senator Kelly referred to, which is a weekly payment of €2 or so less than the standard €188 per week. The second one, which we will probably discuss further later, is what is called a special needs payment or exceptional needs payment, ENP, in social welfare parlance. That is a fund for people who go to a community welfare officer when there is a particular need. We are spending between €46 million and €50 million per year on that.

As Senator Kelly said, the supplementary welfare allowance is an elastic amount because it depends on the number of people coming forward who will qualify. I emphasise to Senators that somebody who has a special need arising from this will qualify to seek a supplementary welfare allowance.

In the context of the work of the Department becoming a public employment service, I had the privilege of having a great deal of contact with employers around the country and on many occasions had an opportunity to discuss issues around illness. For some types of employment large amounts of employee sick leave is a significant cost, particularly so in parts of the public service. In this particular case the impact of this measure will be to give the public service type employer a very strong incentive to better manage short-term illnesses of employees. It is hoped the outcome of that will be less overall illness and also less development of a pattern of people having repeated and significant amounts of short-term illnesses. From what Members were saying, they are quite familiar with that. It is important that is managed at the level of the actual job. It is not possible for the Department of Social Protection to manage that in any detail. That is for the management of the employer. This will give an enhanced incentive to employers to manage it.

In terms of all the different illness payments, including disability and invalidity, as a country we are spending approximately €3 billion. That is about 16% of our payments whereas in Europe the average is about 10% or 11%. We have a problem in Ireland, therefore, with higher volumes of people on different types of disability benefit. This is precious money and in terms of social welfare provision we must ensure it is targeted at the people who have very serious illnesses and disabilities and who probably merit more support than they currently get because of the pervasiveness of and the larger number of illness claims here than is the norm in many other countries. Hence, many other countries have moved under statutory sick pay arrangements, including in the United Kingdom, to make employers responsible for all of the first four months. In the Netherlands, which once had such a problem when it was described as the sick man of Europe, such responsibility in respect of employers has moved to two years. We are not doing that. We are moving to a period of six days and I expect that will make a modest saving - it is about €20 million a year - but I hope it will result in a significant improvement in the management of short-term illnesses in employment.

I was told by IBEC that 75% of its members have statutory sick pay schemes. To refer to what Senator Harte said, around the country at the different forums which I addressed on getting people back to work, people said repeatedly that in their small firm all the employees know each other, the management know them and where somebody is ill and has to take time off, that is not a problem for the small employer employing a small number of people. Employees are very anxious to work but there is a problem in some organisations with the way this has evolved. Currently, it is costing us €661 million. This measure will achieve a modest but important saving.