Richard Boyd Barrett Criticises PUP Cuts That Hit Taxi Drivers

Minister, I just want to take you up on your earlier offer for ideas in terms of the July stimulus I heard in your speech earlier on and I want to focus on a few particular groups because I think that the pandemic and the lockdown affected huge numbers of people in terms of their income. their employment and their livelihoods but there are very particular groups that have been very very hard hit and are likely to be hard hit for the foreseeable future as long as Covid-19 remains with us and I think as well as big broad measures and schemes like the micro finance amendment you know to the micro finance bill that you're making we need to be very specific in looking at sectors that are particularly hard hit and where big broad policy moves don't really capture the specifics and I think it's the day that's the day that's in it because all day I have been receiving calls from two of those sectors and they're sectors that I have raised with you when you were in government well you're still in government in slightly different form before the establishment of the new government repeatedly over the last number of weeks in arts live entertainment music and the gig economy because many of them today found that their PUP payments were cut from the 350 payment to the 203 payment and that is because and I did warn the government that this was coming a failure to recognise the specifics of their particular their particular situation and now people whose incomes and livelihoods and frankly futures for the foreseeable for the foreseeable future have been devastated by the Covid situation are being kicked when they're down they're being kicked and they were kicked this morning with letters informing them that their payments were being caught the PUP payments were being caught and there's more of this likely to happen next week because if you're on the payment and you don't sort of jump through a number of other hoops early next week so let's take a look at the topic in this regard and let's start with taxi drivers okay so taxi drivers whose income was deemed to be less than 200 euro are having their payment cut but in fact this turns out to be a huge huge cohort of taxi drivers partly because it's based on 218 figures which is sort of random enough but also because they have very significant outgoings that reduce their incomes but which those outgoings continue during Covid when their income disappeared and against a background where if they return to work and now there's pressure on them to return to work because their payment has been cut and some of them mightn't want to because they're still worried about the health situation but even if they do want to they know they know they are going back to an employment in a situation where their income is not likely to recover to anything even close to pre-Covid levels for the foreseeable future you know we're on the second stage of a very specific bill but here's a group in talking about the bill you're meant to talk about its contents or what might reasonably be expected to be in it I haven't heard you're getting to I presume you're expanding on what might be in it and who doesn't benefit if you're talking about something completely different then you're out of order well first of all the minister invited suggestions in this debate specifically about the July stimulus right he did actually invite that so I'm responding to that invite maybe he did but the standing orders require you to address your attention to what's in the bill or to what you think should be in it yeah well the taxi drivers as a group are actually excluded from nearly all of these uh supports uh for reasons I don't understand apparently I was trying to get the taxi some of the taxi drivers to explain it to me it was something to do with the fact uh that they don't pay VAT or they don't or they aren't they don't charge VAT I didn't frankly fully understand it but I know they're excluded from a lot of the uh support schemes for small enterprise they don't pay rates right okay so that's an unfairness uh because you know many of them have for example been told you're not really going to get any work or it's very difficult to get work and there's very little work around anyway unless you put in screens and any event the NTA hasn't told them what a standard screen would that would cover you know the past muster in terms in short in terms of insurance uh and so on uh would actually look like because there hasn't been clear direction uh on that and also just because they have continued costs during this period like repayments on their cars like ongoing maintenance of their cars uh insurance costs uh uh and um uh the uh yeah you know whole series of ongoing costs even though they weren't working uh those costs uh continue and if they return to work uh and they're obviously under more pressure to do so now because their payments are being cut as i said when they return to work they're going to find that that their income is insufficient to cover those costs anyway they won't be able to pay their insurance and just remind ourselves that taxi drivers at the moment if you're lucky you're paying two or three grand in insurance but if you're not so lucky you'd be paying four five and up to ten thousand euro in some cases in insurance uh you might be paying about 600 euro per month on uh the repayments on your car uh you'll be paying maintenance of probably about two thousand euro a year and when you are back driving and these days if you go back on the road you'll be paying about seven thousand euro a year in fuel but you'll be driving around the streets looking for customers not able to find any micro i'm saying that they are micro enterprises they are the definition of a micro in fact they're the most micro of micro enterprises and they deserve a bit of support different if you're not addressing deputy point barrett if you're not you're here a long time now you know the rules fairly well if if you're not addressing what's in the bill or what you think should be in the bill then you're not compliant with with with standing orders we all could get up and start waxing lyrical about all sorts of things that are important and what you're talking about is vitally important but i'm afraid it's not relevant it's a micro enterprise so yes no but we're not talking about i think any bill any bill that government the government should put forward uh supporting uh micro enterprises should take these specifics into account yes that's what i do that's that's the point i'm making uh and i'm appealing for the government to do that and in the meantime i'm appealing to the government not to cut their payments uh and to maintain those payments as income subsidies not because it's not they don't want to stay unemployed they don't particularly want an unemployment payment they want to be able to work but they want to be uh there has to be a recognition on the government's part and this is true of lots of other of these micro enterprises that for them and often it's the ones who are worst hit there is no likelihood of a full recovery anytime soon so we need to maintain income subsidies to them but also then allow them to earn on top of that until they get to a point where they can stand on their own two feet because there is a genuine recovery so that's the point i'm making ken corla and a similar point we made i heard deputy murphy mentioning sound engineers but you could generalize that more to people right across the arts and live entertainment and music industry again by the way in most cases people who will not benefit from this bill uh and won't won't be able to access uh these loans and wouldn't pass muster or wouldn't even be considered for many of these uh for many of these things even though they are freelancers or loan loan traders um and just again for the minister to sort of understand this if you're somebody who plays in the pubs and clubs in temple bar uh prior to the outbreak of the pandemic you would have been getting about 130 euro for two hours work working in temple bar now if you can get a gig in temple bar you'll be offered 30 euro uh for two hours if you're lucky enough to get a gig uh and that's just not viable now the people but those people have just had their payments cut um so what do they do how do we help them so i'm just asking for and similarly for people in the uh who are involved in organizing live music events and so on a bit like taxi drivers who have ongoing costs of insurance storage of equipment repayments on equipments they've purchased uh and so on uh but uh have no income coming in and even if things recover a bit and there's no nothing there's no likelihood any time in the near future that there will be a significant recovery those costs continue for them but many of the supports that are being designed have not uh are not available to them but they're also having their payments cut now many of them are having their payments cut uh are having their payments uh caught now and so those are the two particular groups i wanted to speak up for and then finally uh maybe very specifically on the bill itself uh count corda and i was talking to somebody today or yesterday in duniri who has uh you know is the definition of um a firm that's supposed to be covered by this uh bill who has uh they make sofas and they have eight employees just below the threshold of nine uh required uh but uh they are having difficulty basically being told they can't uh you know they can't pass the criteria necessary to do it but also worried about to get to access uh these loans but also worried about taking on extra debt and about the interest and so on uh on uh on that so i think we need again to have a a scheme where we really work with the micro enterprise look at the particular difficulties they're facing and tailor the supports in that way and not have rigid criteria or excessive interest rates uh or a a debt burden that is just going to not make the supports sustainable for those particular uh for those particular businesses so i'll leave it at that thanks for your forbearance