BUDGET SPEECH 2011 by Joe Bossano

Mr Speaker, in every budget since I was first elected to this House in 1972 my main contribution to the debate on the Annual Appropriation Bill has been to provide an assessment of the Government finances and generally of the economy. This I will not be doing this year. I know that the one member who has already made clear that my past contributions in this respect counted for little or perhaps even for nothing is the mover of the Bill, the Chief Minister, who said as much in his speech in 2009 when I was not present and I had been unable to participate due to my wife’s illness.

I shall have to wait until he exercises his right of reply to see if he thinks my views on employment and related matters are worthy of any higher consideration by him than my previous contributions, but I suspect they will not since the element in previous years dealing with employment has invariably been rubbished by him.

In recent months we have seen a miraculous change on his part, what I believe he likes to describe as “a conversion on the road to Damascus”, following his state of shock when he discovered that a local company, engaged in providing cleaning services to the Government, did not employ even a single Gibraltarian. I know Mr Speaker that if I had made such a statement it would have been the worst form of jingoistic, pseudo nationalistic nonsense of the worst kind and a reflection of the fact that I only know how to appeal politically to the voters of Gibraltar on the basis of racism. He tells me this regularly when I defend the concept of jobs for Gibraltarians
I also know that none of this applies to his reaction on being appalled at finding out that there could be Gibraltarian ladies denied the opportunity of being employed as office cleaners and that such jobs have been going to outsiders.
You see Mr Speaker; the Honourable Member is incapable of being a jingoistic, pseudo nationalistic racist that talks nonsense.

In his case, his dismay at the discovery is due to his adorable character, the effect of which is that he cannot go to sleep at night with a clear conscience knowing that some foreigners may be taking away all the jobs of our home grown cleaning ladies.
I note that he is appalled at this discovery and need to point out that it doesn’t say much for his Minister for Employment whose job it is to monitor these things, who has a complete breakdown of every single employer in Gibraltar and who at the click of a mouse can produce a printout of all those others with an equally abysmal record in not employing Gibraltar resident workers in general and Gibraltarians in particular.

Still I am glad for the sake of those whose prospects of employment will now be enhanced that this particular company landed on the Honourable member’s desk and has triggered the reaction that it has and which we were told about last week. Equally it is good news that the Government are finally doing something to require construction companies that get public contracts to provide employment opportunities to those residents, Gibraltarian and others, seeking employment through the Employment Service. I have to remind the Honourable member on how many occasions I have pointed out that the statistics produced by the Government showed a declining Gibraltarian participation in the construction sector over the years, even though the size of the sector was increasing and I remind the House that instead of addressing the issue, for my pains all I received were insults being accused of everything from being racist to manipulating the statistics.

Be that as it may, as I have said something is now going to be done and better late than never. The reality is that if JBS had not been there in the first place and if the Government had not provided it with a steady flow of work over the years, there would be precious little left of a residual pool of construction industry skills which I believe it is important to maintain within the resident workforce.

In his right of reply the mover last year said there were many more Gibraltarians in the construction industry then, than in 1996
He also said that the there is a Gibraltarian psychosis that a construction industry job is not one where the Gibraltarians will want to work.

At the same time the Member responsible for Employment made the remarkable observation that there was a skills shortage among unemployed Gibraltarians in 2010, because 21 years earlier in 1989 the Construction Centre at Landport, which gave school leavers a 12 month basic induction course in a variety of labouring tasks for the industry and paid them a daily allowance, a pocket money, of a couple of pounds was closed by agreement with those involved. The trainees on completion of the induction course, prior to 1989, used to be employed as boy labourers.

The New Harbours Construction Industry Training Centre opened at a later stage funded by the EU, was set up to provide craft training. It has continued to date to produce craftsmen, who in many instances have not been able to compete effectively in the private sector for the jobs available against the inflow of frontier workers linked to the construction companies already there. He also said last year that this was now being put right, that is from last year. Well what appears to have been done for this industry since last year is the recent introduction of the requirement on government contracts, which will not increase the pool of resident skilled workers in the industry but which we hope will be reflected in future in a higher proportion of Gibraltarians working in this industry than in the last 12 months.

The fact remains that, on the basis of the figures available, the number of Gibraltarians in employment in construction jobs has not grown and what has happened is that at the very most those retiring or moving to other jobs have been replaced. The Centre must by now have had something like 16 or 17 intakes of trainees and has created over the years a few hundred craftsmen . Its role should be expanded and its output increased, if we want to see a bigger home-grown construction crafts pool of resident workers and I believe it can be done.

Is it not strange then, that the Government should have put a scheme this year to put pressure on employers to provide employment for Gibraltarians if the blame lies with the unemployed and not with the employers? But of course the views the government puts one year are no guidance to what it is going to say the next.
What we were told last year is not true. When this government was elected in May 1996 there were 758 Gibraltar construction workers out of workforce of 1261. Based on the 2009 Report, last year there were 751 less after 14 years and the total construction workforce was up by 1,120 to 2,381.

This year, meaning the October 2010 Report tabled today, Gibraltarians are down by 4 at 747 and the total is up by 63.

The information we are getting on employee jobs in the Construction Sector for October 2010 are a reflection of what was happening in the filling of vacancies at that time. According to the Minister, in September of last year 238 employee jobs were filled for construction workers out of which a mere 6 were Gibraltarians.
At this rate their share of the jobs can only go in one direction, down. It is to be hoped that the requirements introduced in government contracts recently will have an effect in reversing this trend.

Now, the Honourable Member may argue that a loss of 7 jobs or 4 jobs is not significant, but the whole point is that it should be growing and that he claimed it was growing since we have had a construction training centre created in 1996, which was set up with EU funding precisely to provide a regular supply of construction tradesmen.

In 2009 he boasted that there were 946 Spaniards employed in the construction sector alone and that the government was delighted to be providing increasing numbers of frontier workers from the Spanish hinterland with job opportunities and that the total was actually much higher than the 3,341 official figure when the illegal unregistered labour was taken into account.
Well, we cannot and do not agree with this approach.

In fact, the number of Gibraltarians out of work and registered with the Employment Service at the end of September 2009 was 450, having been as high as 525 in July, and as the end of September 2010 was 415. The level of unemployment in May 1996, which is his point of reference, was 331 a figure he attacked as too high before the election of that year and then declared to be almost full employment after the election.

Clearly in an economy of our size there can never be a permanent construction industry workforce able to deal with all the large construction projects which require a surge in the supply of labour at short notice and for limited periods, the demand for which disappears when the project is over. This has happened in the past with large construction investment projects, the kind of private investment that used to be described by the members opposite as an optical illusion because the impact of the investment on the economy would only last during the construction phase.

Well Mr Speaker, the same could be said of the impact of the construction industry’s activity of the last 2 or 3 years except that the optical illusion, if illusion it is, is nowadays funded by public spending using borrowed money. As I have made clear on many occasions, we have not opposed increased borrowing for capital spending as they used to, we have only questioned the wisdom or judgment in the choice or the costs of some of the areas of this spending.

According to the previous Survey the highest ever recorded number of total employee jobs was in October 2008 when it reached 20,509. It is clear that this is not a figure of the total number of people in employment since for example it includes community officers on the social wage provided by Community Care Limited which according to a recent tribunal are not employees of the charity and are not covered by the provisions of the Employment Act.

The charity has been filling the questionnaire for the Employment Survey as if they were an employer and as if the persons concerned were their employees. In previous debates in this House both sides have referred to community officers as employees of Community Care and the Government Employment Survey treats them as such. Obviously this anomaly can only be put right by correcting the Employment Survey Reports and ensuring that the charity does not provide false returns, or else requiring the charity to ensure that the provisions of the Employment Act apply to those occupying these positions in the charity, which they include as employees in their returns.

It is a fact that until recently the issue was not very relevant since in the past community officers were only recruited from persons aged over 60, who were registered as unemployed. Their inclusion was therefore on the basis that the persons concerned were unemployed, able to work and seeking employment and that they ceased to be registered with the Employment Service on engagement as community officer. The system no longer operates like this. The numbers originally affected did not therefore change very much from year to year and consequently it had no impact in analysing and comparing the size of the labour force between one year and the next. However the change introduced in 2009 by which persons already in full-time employment or part-time employment could take a second job with Community Care if their existing earnings from employment were below £20,000 has led to a huge increase in those engaged in this capacity.

This has led the charity to argue at a tribunal that, since it has a problem in finding work for those engaged given the numbers involved, frequently they are required to do not more than 1 or 2 hours a week if at all, hence the view taken that since no work is demanded in exchange for the payment they are not really employees at all. It was primarily on this basis that the tribunal concluded it had no jurisdiction under the Employment Act.

The relevance of this is twofold, one is that the Employment Survey for 2009 shows that 196 of the supposed increase in the number of employee jobs was accounted for by the engagement of community officers in a manner that did not result in the filling of vacant employee jobs at all. Therefore the decline in the total workforce in that year was not from 20,509 to 20,450 which included the 196 extra community officers, but to 20,254 excluding the latter. A decline of 59 thus converts into a real decline of real jobs of 255. Fulltime Gibraltarian jobs in 2009 were 8,479 and in 2008 8,569, a drop of 90. This did not prevent the Honourable Member telling Gibraltar in his New Year message in January 2010 that there were significantly more Gibraltarians in employment then than ever before.

That there should be more Gibraltarian in employment every year is what should be happening, not least because our population increases every year. This is one of the favourite tricks employed by the Government. Every year the price of things go up, every year we are a year older and every year more children leave our schools than workers retire. None of this is a great achievement attributable to the GSD government. To say that there are more Gibraltarians seeking employment or more Gibraltarian getting jobs means nothing even if it were true, which it frequently isn’t. The issue is how many of the jobs that come up go to local residents, Gibraltarians and others and how many go to outsiders, and the answer to the question is to be found in the statistics published by the Government which confirms that the complaint that people in the streets voice is correct and a true reflection of what is happening in the labour market.

I can inform the House that the number of community officers in October 2010 had almost reached 700 and my understanding is that these continue to be included as employee jobs even though they are not employee jobs. It also means that the payment to those concerned is also treated as earnings from employment in the computation of the GDP, when it is not.

The effect will not be large but the more accurate the information the better equipped we are in this House to make an assessment of the state of the economy of which the most important element is the workforce.

If we look at the earnings from employment in the national income calculation for 2008/09 and 2009/10 the increase between the years derived from the entire workforce of over 20,000 was £15 million and about 20% of this figure, about £3 million, would have been attributable to community officers receipts if there were 700 then. This puts the matter in context.

In fact when we are looking at number of jobs in the economy it is better to concentrate on the figure for full-time jobs since, as the report makes clear, the total is not number of employees but numbers of jobs meaning that as well as the case of community officers, even where the jobs are real, part-time employment is often in addition to full-time employment by the same individual already included.

The 2009 survey showed that the number of full-time jobs fell from 17,437 in 2008 to 17,049 in 2009, a drop of 388, 98 of which were jobs previously held by Gibraltarians. These figures are the latest available to the House published before today’s meeting. The 2010 employment survey results, both as regards employment levels and as regards the impact of employment earnings on the national income, is applicable in the consideration of the 2010/11 GDP calculation of which at this stage there is only a preliminary estimate and as we have seen from the estimate given a year ago, the new method of calculation in respect of company profits means that the figure can change quite a lot. The estimated GDP for 2009/10 was originally put at £914 million and we have this week seen the figure revised to £954 million with the largest contribution to the increase coming from gross trading profits of companies currently put at £230 million but which could increase further.

The employment survey report tabled today, of which I was given a copy on Friday, shows the position as at October 2010 which will be reflected as regards earning from employment as I have said in the GDP calculation for the last financial year.
The survey shows an increase of some 5.5% in such earnings, given the very high-level of government spending in construction work in the last financial year and in the current year, and the multiplier effect of such expenditure, it follows that much of the growth continues to be generated as it has been in 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 and by the effect of this expenditure.

Just how much of the activity is due to the government input will only be really known when the projects now under construction are complete.
As was made clear during question time, the government is now practically the only customer of the construction industry and is putting out work to ensure that a number of local companies survive this period, when there is apparently no private sector development in progress or ready to start. We saw this from the 2008/2009 expenditure side of the GDP calculation when the gross domestic fixed capital formation by the Private Sector was imported equipment and very little construction work.

The government for the last three years has only been able to undertake this level of construction projects by increasing the public debt.

How high the public debt is or whether it is too high or too low is not a subject with which we have taken issue in Parliament, but of course if the government considers that it needs to justify their debt level by comparing it with the past, then it has to be said for the record that the comparison needs to be on a like for like basis.

The gross debt of Gibraltar peaked at £99m in 1995 but there was a dedicated sinking fund to amortise the loan. By april 1996 loan repayment reduced the gross debt to £65m and then to £60m by December.

Until then net debt meant the  amount borrowed less the amount available in the sinking fund to repay the loan, however the cash holdings in all the other funds, the piggy banks, as the member calls them, which at the time it was not the policy to offset against the public debt, in effect were enough to bring it down to zero.

If we wish to compare the level to-day with any level in the past it is obvious that to calculate the one as it used to be done before, and to calculate the other as it has been done since 2009 can serve no other purpose than to produce a distorted picture.

The Honourable Member regularly describes as the economically more accurate measure of the level of our indebtedness, the debt expressed as a percentage of GDP. I am sure he knows that many economists are of the view that the more relevant ratio is debt to revenue for small open economies like ours, where the level of GDP could change dramatically because of external events or maybe an increasing part of national income could be leaking out of the economy, as is happening now with ours.

The ratio in the 2009 legislation placed the limit at 80% of revenue, and the debt has been much closer to this limit than the GDP ratio in the last couple of years.

One interesting effect on portraying how modest our debt level is by concentrating on the net figure, is the effect that has been brought about in the last couple of years by closing piggy banks and shifting the cash to the Consolidated Fund.

A good example is the decision circulated last Friday to transfer £930,000 in respect of the financial year 2010/2011 and £530,000 for the current year, 2011/12, from the Savings Bank to the Consolidate Fund, reflected in the Page 10 amendments.

The effect of this is to immediately reduce our debt by £1.5 million and at the same time enable a lower ratio of net debt to GDP to be published, so that we can claim that it is even lower than predicted. The £216.7 used today by the  Mover of bill is the result of this change on Friday, the day before the net debt was £217.6, but it does not mean Gibraltar became a million pounds better off as a result.

 Incidentally, the decision in respect of the current financial year to transfer £530,000, which may or may not materialise between now and March 2012, is a reversal of the policy that the decision on the transfer of surplus from the Savings Bank would only be made at the close of the financial year, when the extent of the surplus, if any, was known. Hence, the estimates in the Savings Bank providing a zero surplus for transfer at the beginning of the financial year, as shown in page 157 last year.

As regards the increase in employee jobs between 2009 and 2010, given the short time that the report has been available there are a few items that I would like to draw to the attention of the house subject to a more thorough analysis of the report which I have not been able to undertake so soon.

Of the headline figure of 525 more jobs, 182 are part-time jobs and 35 of these are in the MoD, as shown in table 1.

If we now look at the balance of 343 extra full-time jobs we find that the increase in male held jobs is also 343 and that the number of full-time jobs held by Gibraltarians is down by 12.
In the past when we have compared one year's report with the preceding year the government has been quick to point to the footnote that says the distinction between Gibraltarian and UK British has a problem of accuracy. They never think there is a problem of accuracy when there is an increase in Gibraltarian jobs, only when there is a fall. Since there is no way of knowing if the problem is overstatement of one or the other, I have always argued that the only way to deal with the data is to accept the breakdown as given.  However, I feel the need on this occasion that UK British job losses at 55 are even bigger than the Gibraltarian ones, to point out that misclassification is hardly the answer. There was also a drop of 47 Moroccans. So comparing full-time employee jobs between October 2009 and October 2010 what we see is an increase of 392 Spanish nationals, 35 other EU nationals, and 30 non-EU nationals, a total increase of 457, which when we deduct the decline in Gibraltarians, British and Moroccans leaves us with a net gain of 343.

This would indicate that the change in the employment situation as far as full employment is concerned has been a drop of resident workers and an increase in frontier workers. This trend was welcomed by the government in the past on the false premise that our economy could not grow with lesser frontier workers, which kept on increasing every year and the premise that they were not taking jobs from our people because our people didn't want the jobs they took, or were not skilled enough or flexible enough or for whatever other reason not suitable. I am not sure that this is still the view but if it is not because the cleaning company experience has changed their mind then that is good news for resident workers. Of course the government can turn around and argue that table 1 does not provide a breakdown of frontier and resident workers and so the analysis is pure speculation on my part. Well I'm afraid the figures are worse than suggested by the above analysis. I invite members to look at table 5 on page 3 of the survey report. This puts the year to year increase at 742.  The mover of the Bill when I have referred to this table in previous budgets has accused me of trying to mislead the house by not mentioning that some of the frontier workers are Gibraltarians. Well as far as the impact on the economy is concerned, as he should know from the input output study to which he attached so much importance when it was commissioned, the reduction in the multiplier effect on account of frontier workers is not determined by their nationality. But if it makes him happier or maybe it makes him less happy as he would not be able to accuse me of manipulating the figure, I can tell him that the increase in the Gibraltarian workers who became frontier workers was 32 out of 742, leaving a total increase of 710 non-British frontier workers filling jobs in October 2010 more than in October 2009, even though the total number of jobs was up by only 525.

The Government knows that we believe more should have been done to reverse this trend which has led to an increase of frontier workers as recorded by the Employment Surveys by some 5000 between October 1996 and October 2010.

Community Care’s future is another bone of contention.
The ticking time bomb under community care has been the way the Government has chosen to describe the situation, not mine. If anything can be said to be designed to make pensioners worry about the future of the support they get from Community Care, surely it is to tell them that there is a ticking time bomb, not to say as we have done, that our policy is to continue with the system.

Here we have a classical example of irresponsible and politically self-serving arguments put forward by the Honourable member opposite.

If the Government says it’s a ticking time bomb in the budget of 2009 and has done nothing about it 2 years later, either it’s not such a grave risk as he chose to portray by his choice of words, or he is failing to put in place a better system with a lower risk which he claims to have up his sleeve having been preparing for this by deliberately running down the reserves of Community Care.

The crime that I am accused of is, that having seen no evidence of what he says, and having seen a number of changes introduced which in my judgement if anything increased rather than reduced the exposure to risk and which I think is not in anybody’s interests for me to spell out, when I say I don’t agree with him but I will hold back my judgement on the alternative when I know what it is, I am accused of scaring our pensioners.

This Parliament is being asked by the Government to vote money for Community Care again this year with no attempt being made to deal with the exposure to risks which he says exists which he says he knows how to cure at no cost to either existing beneficiaries or future beneficiaries and which he chooses not to put in place just yet. Why if there is this huge risk which he only discovered after Community Care run out of money in 2009, why does he not give it priority?

As usual with the Honourable member he has given different reasons. In January 2010 he said he would introduce it during the year. Towards the end of 2010 he said there was slippage and that it would happen in 2011. Well I do not see what priority he has given to the Legislation Unit in 2009 if after 18 months the legislation he says he needs to introduce was simply not ready.

Now it is 2 years and we still don’t know exactly when this legislation will see the light of day or whether the legislation will be published before the general election.

We were told in the Budget last year that the danger of the ticking time bomb blowing up was not imminent.

Well I can only say that if someone knows there is a ticking time bomb, knows how to disable the bomb and knows when it is going to blow up, the not unreasonable conclusion is that the person who knows all this is the person that put the time bomb there, in the first place.

I cannot for the life of me understand why he has chosen to make such statements which can only serve to encourage others to do something we would all want not to happen without being ready to immediately deal with the risk.

Because I press him to come clean and present his alternative to Community Care, because although we do not agree there is a need to change it, we say will judge his alternative and decide if we can support it when we know what it is, because our position is to reserve our judgement when we know what he is up to, he claimed last year that this meant that I poo, pood his idea.

Mr Speaker, I can assure the member that poo, pooing was not something that I was ever taught how to do, in the area of our City where I was born and bred, near Devil’s Gap, it may be polite public school terminology, but in my environment we always used more, shall we say, robust language, to decry or oppose something.

He said last year that his government sees a real danger for future generations and was going to do it because it was the responsible thing to do to protect future generations without affecting their pensions. Our reply is that we do not see the danger, but if you do get on with it and don’t waste any more time.

He claims that this reply makes us unfit to win a election. He insists that it will be done but that the ticking time that only he sees is not going to explode just yet.

Well there is another ticking time bomb, the one he will have to face in the coming general election, and that has a definite date by when it has to go off! Though I accept he is the only one that can decide, for a while, when the ticking stops. Perhaps he has chosen not to protect future generations after all and use the risk he claims to see as an election platform, because the window of opportunity, if legislation is needed to deal with this issue, is fast closing and if the danger is real he should delay it not one day longer.
Today he has produced a new version of his motives for wanting to get rid of Community Care.

He says that the payments are charitable hand outs and that they should become a legal right. This is incredible Mr Speaker. Nobody has ever suggested that the independent entity with charitable status that receives Government funding from the proceeds of import duty, has spend 22 years dispensing charitable welfare payments to those who are too poor to look after themselves.

The status of the institution as a charity is because it is not a profit making organisation. To imply that the social wage extension in 2009, introduced at his suggestion to which I refered above which pays up to £5k per year to persons with an occupational pension irrespective of its size, as well as earnings of £15k from gainful employment is an undignified and offensive handout is simply unbelievable .
The very risk that he has been hinting at for two years is the one that arises when Governments elsewhere pay out statutory amounts that are not means tested, not linked to any threshold and not linked to the payment of contributions. If he has discovered an alternative that can preserve all the benefits at present provided by community care and intends to stop funding the Trust after December and pay directly the beneficiaries as from January, together with the social insurance old age pensions, then it is not enough to say so in a couple of paragraphs. If he is saying that the money we are voting this week is to allow the Trust to continue until December and that in January they will no longer have  a role to play and that the social security department will be making the same payments to the same persons then he needs to produce the alternative mechanism now and not after the general election. If when we see it we agree that it works, we will support it. But I have to say that if payments to pensioners directly by the Government is less exposed to challenge and less risky than payments from a private charity, then everything the experts have been saying since 1989 has been complete nonsense.

The Government has now decided to proceed with the closure of the civil service pension scheme for new recruits
It does not seem to have been a big issue since it has not been opposed to any large extent by any of the unions that represent the existing members of the final salary civil service pension scheme

I notice that the cost of pensions for Civil Servants is due to increase this year by £400,000, from £19.6 to £20 million. Last year we had an estimated increase of £1 million and the outturn is £1.6 million, so I would suggest that this figure which I know we do not have to vote is likely to be much higher.

Obviously the effect on the total pension cost of the replacement by a funded scheme will I imagine not start to show up until the number of existing pensioners stabilizes and earlier in the house we have been told that the additional number of civil service pensions paid to new retirees last year was about 100 or so.
                                                                                                                                                                                    
As has been mentioned by the government there are actually over 1000 public servants, which includes those employed through the GDC, already on the provident trust money purchase scheme. Their contributions are being shown in the departments to which they have been allocated and I assume that the new subheads, currently provided with a token £1,000, throughout the estimate is to provide for any new Civil Service entrants once the final salary scheme is closed and contributions to the Provident fund have to be made.

Mr Speaker whilst the government has decided that the civil service pension scheme could not be afforded any longer and the potential pension liability for the future would be too great a burden for future generations and they also believe that the future of Community Care as it stands is at risk and the major reforms are required to make it safe it does not seem to think that the statutory social insurance pension system presents any unsustainable burden for the future and although I have raised this regularly at budgets the government simply brushes aside the issue
So whilst not expecting they will agree that something needs to be done in this area I simply put it down for the record that in our view the statury scheme which provides social insurance pensions is bound to face serious problems in the not too distant future as presently structured.

The reply from the government on this is, so what. It is a government responsibility and the government could choose to close down the fund altogether and pay it out of the Consolidated Fund. Well of course they could choose to do this or anything else.
In 1997 he was saying the fund was too low at £36 million and the government was committed to making capital injections to increase its reserves. This was when he was incorrectly accusing me of having allowed the reserves to fall when in fact the opposite was true, and they had gone up. Now we are told the very opposite. His defence for doing nothing last year was to say, ‘the statutory benefits fund is just a piggy bank; a government piggy bank, which could be in the general reserves if the Government wanted it to. If the Government Statutory fund had no money at all, zero pounds in it, then the Government would simply pay statutory benefits as it pays today civil service pensions. These are government liabilities like any other’.

The whole point is that if one cannot raise any issue here without having it brushed aside and at the same time face the accusation of wanting to scare our senior citizens, as if I was saying I wanted to stop their pensions instead of trying to make them more secure by pointing to areas of concern, which is what we are being invited to do by having a debate on government expenditure, we might as well put the Appropriation Bill to the vote and be done with it.
The government's approach to its reserves is that the public debt is correctly defined as if all the piggy banks, which are now almost entirely in the Consolidated Fund, were readily available to repay the public debt in order to establish the net debt ceiling.  In this respect the contingent liability to meet the deficiencies in social insurance pensions or the funding to continue the operation of community Care because its reserves have been exhausted, are treated as if it did not form part of the equation. The government does not seem to accept that when  community care had its own reserves of £60 million and the social insurance fund its own reserves of £36 million at the very least one could say that there was a £96 million buffer before the contingent liability on government reserves could be triggered. That is no longer the case and it makes a significant difference.
The number of persons in receipt of social insurance pensioners is growing by about 500 a year.

We believe that the ‘Pay as you Go’ system will only work for as long as the number of employees grows faster than the number of new pensioners and given the dependence of the construction sector on public spending and the fact that numerically this is the largest area of employee jobs in the economy in a few years we could be facing a situation of declining contributor and increasing pensioner numbers.

I note that just like the civil service pensions, there is another item that does not require a vote and cannot be raised at committee stage, which is Head 7(1) of Consolidated Fund charges, where the estimate for repayment of revenue is £5 million this year and the revised forecast for last year is up from £20,000 to £5 million. The footnote says that this is under section 14 of the Public Finances (Control and Audit) Act, which just tells us that it is the payment of refunds required to be made but gives no indication as to what it is and to whom it is paid. The Honourable member has told us today that these are tax refunds. This raises the question where was such tax refunds shown in previous year’s estimates of expenditure, or is it that previously tax receipts were shown net of such refunds. I would be grateful is this matter could be clarified.

Finally, Mr Speaker, I would be grateful if I could have a complete list of the number of employees, with a breakdown by company, at the end of March 2010 and 2011, as requested in Oral Questions 1135 and 1136, given that the answer provided was incomplete.