I move:
That the Social Welfare (Agricultural Employees) Regulations, 1974, proposed to be made by the Minister for Social Welfare and laid in draft before Dáil Éireann on the 20th day of December, 1973, under subsection (4) of Section 10 of the Social Welfare (Pay-Related Benefit) Act, 1973, be approved.
The purpose of these regulations is to bring male and female argicultural workers into the pay-related benefit scheme from the start. That scheme is provided for under the Social Welfare (Pay-Related Benefit) Act, 1973, and the necessary order has been made to bring it into operation from the beginning of the next income tax year on 6th April, 1974.
The scheme is designed for persons whose social insurance covers them for disability benefit, maternity allowance and unemployment benefit. Pay-related benefit will be paid as a supplement to these flat rate benefits during periods of incapacity for work or unemployment. Benefit will be based on the claimant's earnings in a previous income tax year and particulars of these earnings will be supplied to my Department by the Revenue Commissioners. The scheme will be financed by pay-related contributions levied on employers and employees. These contributions will amount to 3 per cent of the employee's current earnings up to a ceiling of £2,500 in the year, the employer paying 2 per cent and the employee 1 per cent. They will be collected by the Revenue Commissioners through the income tax collection machinery, mainly by way of PAYE.
When the Act was introduced and, indeed, during the course of its passage through the Oireachtas, it was envisaged that the scheme would, initially, cover only persons paying the ordinary flat-rate social insurance contributions because of the difficulties encountered in arranging a system of collecting pay-related contributions outside that sector. The persons covered by the scheme would thus all be in industrial, commercial and services-type employment. With the abolition from 1st April, 1974, of the remuneration limit of £1,600 for social insurance in the case of non-manual workers, all employees in those employments will be brought within the scope of the pay-related benefit scheme. The main groups of workers not included in the scheme although insured for disability benefit, maternity allowance and unemployment benefit purposes were male and female agricultural workers. Section 10 of the Act, however, gave power for the making of regulations to extend the scheme to cover classes of employees other than those paying the ordinary rate of social insurance contribution.
It had always been the intention to have the coverage of the scheme as wide as possible and to bring agricultural workers in particular into the scheme as soon as it was feasible to do so. With this in mind, officials of my Department and of Revenue continued to explore the matter after the Act had been passed. As a result of their examination, the Revenue Commissioners have agreed to undertake the collection of pay-related contributions from employees in the agricultural sector from 6th April next. It will, therefore, be possible to bring agricultural workers, both male and female, into the scheme from the start and regulations for that purpose have been prepared as provided for in section 10 of the Act. That section, however, requires that drafts of the regulations must be laid before each House of the Oireachtas and that the regulations cannot be made until the draft has been approved by resolution in each House.
The draft regulations which are the subject of this resolution will apply the provisions of the 1973 Act to persons employed in agriculture for whom the special agricultural rates of social insurance contributions are payable by including pay derived from employment in agriculture in the definition of earnings reckonable for the purposes of pay-related benefit and contributions.
I recommend these regulations for the approval of Dáil Éireann.
