Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill

I move, That the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill. This bill resolves a claim filed in the Employment Relations Authority that the time a home and community support worker spends travelling between clients—in-between travel—is work for the purposes of the Minimum Wage Act 1983. The bill sets in place an enduring, affordable, and sustainable framework to remedy the in-between travel issue between Crown-funded employers and their employees. It represents an important milestone in recognising the valuable work of people who provide care and support to assist elderly and disabled New Zealanders to remain in their homes.

Specifically, the bill will implement the settlement agreement between the service providers, support workers and unions, the 20 district health boards, and the Crown for the payment of time and costs for workers travelling between their clients. The settlement agreement also sets out a process for investigating transitioning this important workforce towards a more regularised employment model. This two-pronged approach resolves a longstanding historical issue and looks forward to ensure the service can attract, recruit, and retain a high-quality workforce to meet expected increased demand and services as the population ages.

It delivers increases to support workers’ take-home pay, reimburses them for using their vehicle to deliver services to multiple clients over the course of a day, and commits to investigating how best to increase their certainty of hours of work and ongoing employment and, therefore, their ongoing income. Increased income, reimbursement for vehicle use, increased certainty of hours of work, ongoing employment, and ongoing income will reduce the current 30 to 40 percent industry turnover rate and reduce recruitment and retention pressures.

This is a responsible approach not only to resolving a longstanding industry issue but also to setting out a road map for ensuring that there continues to be a skilled workforce available to support elderly and disabled New Zealanders to live in their homes and be part of the wider community. People depend on these services; it is not a matter of choice. We owe it to New Zealanders that the service they receive is delivered when they need it and is consistent with service specifications set for their level of need, whilst being flexible enough to meet individuals’ specific needs. We also owe it to the increasing number of New Zealanders, as the population ages, who will benefit from these services, to take the time now to ensure that the service can sustain growth in both client demand and expectations.

The challenge is how best to deliver a service that is also affordable and sustainable over the long term. Investigating transitioning towards a more regularised workforce employment model will drive fundamental changes in every aspect of home and community support services, including funding and contracting models, employment terms and conditions, and service delivery specifications. This work will see support workers given more certainty of their hours of work and ongoing employment, working with safe and fair caseloads, supported to upskill, and rewarded for those skills. It will ensure high-quality support services continue to be available to support New Zealanders to live in their homes as the population ages.

The Crown has negotiated the settlement in good faith, and I would like to acknowledge all the parties involved in the tremendous amount of work and effort that everyone has put in. It is very pleasing to see that the unions and health and disability providers agree on what is a fair settlement—one that balances the interests of employers, employees, and the Government. It is equally pleasing to see the level of cooperation right across the sector and the drive that all parties share to ensure that the client remains at the centre of the service. It is important that these Crown-funded employers are supported to meet their obligations under the bill to pay support workers for their time and costs in travelling between their clients.

In support of this, Budget 2014 delivered the sector additional funding of $96 million over 4 years to support the payment of in-between travel. A further uplift of $14 million per year was later allocated as a forward commitment from Vote Health. It is also important that services are not differentiated by funder. Although this bill implements a settlement agreement negotiated within Vote Health, the benefits will extend to home and community support workers funded through the Accident Compensation Corporation to deliver services to clients requiring support due to injury.

This bill is a priority for the Government. It is an important piece of legislation that will ensure that people continue to receive the quality care that they need in order to remain in their homes, while also securing a better future for those who provide home and community support services. I am pleased to be able to present this bill here today, and I commend this bill to the House.

Labour welcomes this bill, the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. It is the settlement of a long-running case, because several years ago the Human Rights Commission ruled that travel time should be remunerated. So I want to begin at the beginning, and give credit to Tamara Baddeley, who bravely took a test case on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers.

Let me tell you about Tamara Baddeley. She is a member of the former Service and Food Workers Union, now a combined union with the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union called E tū. She was working with the union, which filed a test case with the Employment Relations Authority in 2013. At that time, the union secretary, John Ryall, described the situation as a serious injustice and one that needed to be remedied. Tamara was paid $14.80 an hour for the home visits she did when she was helping the clients whom she had responsibility for. Her work included showering these older people, dressing them, feeding them, and checking to see whether they had taken their medication. In one day, her round covered 12 calls around the city in her old, ageing Hyundai. For that she got an allowance of 33c a kilometre, but she got absolutely no payment for the time she spent travelling from one client to the next client. That was treated as if it was her own time, as if she was somehow having a rest or on holiday, or as if it was her tea break. But, of course, to go from one client to the next client it took time to travel there.

What we know is that there are many people who work in New Zealand who travel from one job to another. There would not be a person in this House who has not had to call out a plumber or an electrician, only to find that also included in the cost you get is the cost of their travelling to come to your job—but not for home-care workers. I thought that maybe it had taken so long because of some of the attitudes that we have towards work that women do. I was really staggered when I heard the Prime Minister recently say that he did not think it was discrimination to pay women less; it is just the occupations they are typically involved in. Can you see the irony in that?

Women are paid less because they are in caring occupations—occupations that require them to go in and look after old, vulnerable people. They do not fix things like your plumbing or your electrical wiring; they care for human beings. Because they are in these industries that women are normally in, somehow or other it has been all right to pay them less, and certainly to pay them less when it comes to the payment of travel.

The former Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner under the Human Rights Commission, Dr Judy McGregor—an amazing woman, in my view; a courageous woman, a woman with conviction—brought out a report called Caring Counts: Report of the Inquiry into the Aged Care Workforce in about 2013, or was it a little earlier? I cannot quite remember. It was an amazing report, with many recommendations. She did not just believe what she was told; she went in and worked in the community and in rest homes to see what actually happens to those who are the carers in them. Through her conviction and from what she saw, she decided to get a legal opinion, which concluded that there was a good argument that the travel time between clients constituted work under the Minimum Wage Act.

I thought to myself “Imagine any of us, perhaps. What about the member for Whanganui, who travels in his car, or the member for Palmerston North, who travels in his car from his electorate to Wellington—imagine if their pay was docked or they were not paid when they were travelling to come to work.”, because that is the effect of what was happening to these many, many women.

Judy McGregor, as I said, heard the cases, as we did in Labour. They heard cases. Jonathan Young may have even read this case, because it was from his electorate. I would hope that he put some energy into advocating for them. Trudie Featonby of Taranaki—she clocked up 160 kilometres over 2 weeks. She tracked between her clients in their homes in Bell Block, all the way out to Waitara and back again. At that time, there were 12,000 home-care workers affected.

As home care grows, there will be even greater demand by older, vulnerable disabled people wanting to stay in their own homes. They want to stay in their own homes because that is the place that they know and they are close to friends and neighbours. In effect, they save hundreds of millions of dollars by not needing residential care. The cost of residential care and of the subsidies that are provided is hundreds of dollars a week. By staying at home, with good quality carers, these people are saving taxpayers a heap of money. They will be able to do that only if we retain the health workforce that provides this service. Those who provide this service are the lowest paid.

Home-care workers are the lowest paid in New Zealand, doing some of the hardest work that you could ever do. Anybody who has done any of that sort of work—and I know there are people on this side of the House who have—knows that it is hard, grinding work but very, very rewarding. But the turnover of staff is huge—as high as between 30 and 40 percent. It is low-paid work, with little recognition.

This bill is a very important first step. I say it is a first step because there are still things to deal with for home-care and community support workers, and that includes a historical underpayment of them, not just for their travel but for what we pay for the value of the work that they do. But this bill does settle an agreement. It is an agreement between the Crown, the district health boards, providers of home and community-based and support, employers, and certain unions on behalf of the home and community-based and support employees. The bill supports an agreement that was reached for the payment of travel time between the parties. As the bill says, it “seeks to ensure an enduring, affordable, and sustainable solution for paying HCS employees for the time and the cost of travelling between each of their clients.”

It has a phase in—a transition, if you like—over two time periods. Home-care and support services’ employees will receive payment from 1 July 2015—so it has got a retrospective part to it because it is backdated to then—and they will be paid for time spent travelling between that time until 29 February 2016. The payment will be calculated—and I will not go into it because I do not have time, and we will get to that.

But then from March 2016 the payment will be calculated again and this will then be prescribed in regulation. It does extinguish any other claims. You might say “Oh, doesn’t that sound a bit dicey.”, but it was an agreement reached between the parties, and we need to honour that agreement and support it. Maybe some will feel a bit squeamish about extinguishing other claims, but to settle this, because it was incredibly complex and it could have been incredibly expensive trying to work out back-pay going back many, many years—and probably there are a few people here who could have put in a claim—and because it was agreed that it does extinguish other claims, then we need to support it.

So we welcome this bill. We welcome it at the very good Health Committee, where we will no doubt hear submissions from the public on it. It is a good step along the way to recognise some of the hardest-working, most valuable workforce that we have in New Zealand—overwhelmingly a workforce of women.

I am very pleased to take a call on this Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I want to acknowledge the words of the Minister in bringing this bill to the House but also the member who has just sat down, the Hon Annette King, for her words and the support of the Labour Party at this stage. I think that it is indicative, actually, of, I suppose, the conducive discussions that have been had by various parties to bring this bill to the House.

I am very pleased it is coming to the Health Committee.

💬 Scott Simpson: A good committee.

Well, I think it is a very good committee, Mr Simpson. We know it is a busy committee—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Who chairs it?

—but I hope you do find time to get back to the Coromandel to serve those good people down there. It is actually a busy and hard-working committee. We have a couple of bills before us at the moment, so this will be the third one that we will begin considering—so quite a hard-working and busy committee—but I think, as has been noted in two speeches to date, this is a bill that has, I believe, the widespread support of the House. We will be interested to hear what the other parties are saying in further speeches.

This bill is bringing into effect discussions that have been had. I think that it is important for those listening out there to know that this has come out of a court case and a series of concerns, and we heard some of that raised in the previous speech. This bill puts those agreements into effect. I am just making a distinction here. This is not the Minister of Health or the Ministry of Health making a series of arbitrary decisions. Instead, it is listening to what came through the courts in discussions, effectively, between the Crown, the Ministry of Health, unions, and so forth. I think it is really important to note that it is incredibly critical work that these people do.

I do not claim to have huge experience in this area, other than a couple of years of, if you like, providing home help to people in Fiji. There was no need for transport costs, mainly because you had to walk between villages and everywhere. But I think it is just a small hint of appreciation for the enormous good work that these people do in caring, more often than not, for our most vulnerable in society.

I think we have provided ourselves with a very good outcome here that we are acknowledging not only the work but also—as was pointed out through the court case—that transport in between clients is work as well and should be covered. I think, importantly—and it was mentioned several times by the Minister—this has to be something that is sustainable. I think that has been part of the negotiations since April—to come to a way of providing adequate recompense that all parties can agree to but, importantly, recompense that is sustainable into the future. The Minister did note that the Government in Budget 2014 has put, I think, about $96 million into this with a further, I think, $14 million. So the money is there, but it has been important to bring all of those parties together.

Again, this is a bill to bring into effect the discussions that have been had. I think, as chair of the committee, I just want to acknowledge the hard work that has clearly—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Oh! Now we know who’s the chair.

—gone on. Yes, the Hon Ruth Dyson was having a moment when she could not remember who the chair was, so I thought that we had better indulge her. But we are really pleased at the enormous work that has gone in already, so I want to acknowledge those different parties. We obviously have the service providers, those involved with the union, 20 district health boards, and, of course, the Crown and then the ministry and the Minister himself.

It was being noted at the end by the speaker the Hon Annette King, who was speaking formerly—the previous speaker; there goes grammar at this time in the afternoon—that it is a two-staged process that we are looking at. There are going to be two series of payments: one that, effectively, kicked in from 1 July this year, and that recompense will run through until 29 February next year—so a leap year, clearly. Just reading some notes here because I think it is important to be specific, the payment for that period of time is going to be calculated using a figure that represents the minimum wage for the weighted average of time spent travelling. Then from 1 March 2016 an ongoing regime will be in play. I think it is at least a minimum of 50c per kilometre around transport costs, but again it is to try to reflect some of the costs involved with travel to provide that enormous support.

Again, I am very pleased that this bill is here, bringing effect to those negotiations, and very pleased that the Health Committee will have it. Can I end as I started by thanking those people who work in the homes and in the community to support our most vulnerable, and to say thank you for the tremendous work that you do, and we look forward to progressing this bill through the House.

I want to start my contribution today by acknowledging some of the people who have been involved in the campaign to ensure that home support workers do get paid for their travel time. They are people like Tamara Baddeley, who is a member of what was formerly the Service and Food Workers Union, now the E tū union after its amalgamation with the Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union.

💬 Hon Member: Is that the Latin?

Definitely Māori. And I want to recognise Jenny Goodman as well—a member of the Public Service Association (PSA) who also took a case. So I want to acknowledge those individuals and other individuals like them—other care workers like them—who have stood up and, over years, campaigned through a variety of methods to get the Government to finally recognise their situation and to finally do something about it. They were able to do that with the support of their unions—unions like the Service and Food Workers Union, unions like the PSA.

If anybody seriously believes that unions are somehow irrelevant today, then I would point them to this settlement, because this simply would not have happened if these workers had not been part of organisations that were prepared to support them, to take their legal cases, to negotiate with the district health boards, with their employers, and with the Government, and to actually facilitate everything that needed to happen for the settlement to be reached and for this piece of legislation to be brought before the House. If those caregivers did not have the support of the other workers around them who are also part of that union, this simply would not have happened. I think that is important for us to reflect on because unions play a really important role in ensuring that workers are able to negotiate with the Government—they do that by working together—and workers’ voices simply would not be heard here in Wellington if it was not for those organisations that they are part of.

So this legislation essentially enacts a settlement that was reached between the Government and those unions representing those caregivers, the district health boards, and the employers to ensure that the time caregivers have to use travelling from one client to the next is actually recognised as work time. As Annette King said, it is not some sort of break time. It is not their tea break, although it might be the closest that you are allowed to get to a tea break these days under this Government. It is not downtime for them; it is part of their working day. And given that their wages are already abysmally low for the time that they spend actually in the home with their clients, in effect it meant that a lot of these caregivers were working for less than the minimum wage. When their entire working day was put together, they were, essentially, being paid under the minimum wage, and that was part of the thrust of the case that was taken to the Employment Relations Authority, and, as Annette King said, Judy McGregor had already secured a legal opinion indicating that it was more than likely that they had a good case under the Minimum Wage Act that their remuneration was insufficient to meet the minimum standards of that legislation.

So, as a result of that, the Government entered into negotiations, and we have this settlement, which, it is fair to say, is the result of negotiation. It is the result of some compromise. It is not gold standard, which is a term that has been thrown around a bit today. It is not gold standard, but it is certainly a very significant step forward from the situation that those care workers were in. I think that we here in Parliament need to appreciate—the Government certainly needs to appreciate—that those workers came to the table prepared to negotiate and prepared to settle at a rate that was financially sustainable for the Government.

But that is just one aspect of chronic underfunding of the wider caregiving sector. Certainly we know that in aged residential care the people who provide care—whether they be caregivers, whether they be nurses, or whether they be part of the broader health workforce—are desperately underpaid for the work that they do. The most obvious signal of that is the differentiation between what someone in the caring professions can earn in the aged-care sector as opposed to what they can earn if they are working directly for a district health board. There is no good reason for why that gap should exist, and the only reason that gap exists is that the Government refuses to fund that sector to a level that is actually able to support reasonable wages in that sector. As I say, those wages are so poor that when these caregivers were not paid for their travel time, then, effectively, they ended up on less than the minimum wage.

So, although we are addressing that, there is also a range of other matters we need to address. We need to look at aged care. We need to look at what we pay these home support workers for the time that they are in their homes, because it is a policy of, I think, most parties in this Parliament that more people will be supported to stay in their homes for longer, especially into old age. That is a good policy. A lot of people like that policy—people want to age in their own home. They want to be supported to be able to stay in their own home for as long as possible, and there are myriad benefits from supporting that policy, both for the person themselves and for the State. But we cannot do it on the back of slave wages. We cannot expect these care workers to subsidise that policy.

If we are expecting more people to stay in their homes and we are expecting more of these caregivers to do more work—doing the excellent, wonderful, and sensitive work that they do—then we need to actually support them with wage rates that encourage them to take up the job, encourage them to stay in the sector, and encourage them to undertake the training that will make them better able to provide the level of care that we ought to be providing as a State. If we are expecting people to live a dignified life in their homes with home support, then we need to ensure that we have a qualified and well-supported workforce, and we need to make it a career that people actually want to stay in and invest themselves in. It should not be the kind of job that becomes a sort of a job of last resort. Thankfully, we have thousands of people who are prepared to work in this sector because they feel as though they are making a contribution to their society, but we should not rely on that. We should not take advantage of that. We should actually pay rates that are fair for the work that they are doing, and this is one step in that direction.

I want to again congratulate everyone who has been involved in getting to this point. I will be interested to see—not that I will be on the select committee—what the submissions are and whether any of the submitters believe that the deal can be improved in any way, although I acknowledge that this is the direct result of a matter that has already been settled. But it will be interesting to see whether there is any room for improvement or whether there is any way in which we can work with the Government to make this settlement any more generous and more appropriate for these workers.

With those thoughts, I just want to reiterate what Annette King said, which was that we support this legislation and we look forward to hearing the submissions.

I do sit on the Health Committee, which is so ably chaired by my friend and colleague the member for Tāmaki, Simon O’Connor. I listened carefully to his contribution earlier in this debate, as I also listened carefully to the words of the Minister of Health in introducing the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill for its first reading. I have to say that I was mindful of their comments when listening to Opposition speakers contributing to this debate, because I think that in just listening we can hear across the House that there seems to be broad consensus and appeal for the aims and objectives of this bill. It is a bill that seeks to implement a settlement agreement that has been developed amongst a variety of stakeholders including the Crown, district health boards, and the very providers of home help support and community-based care and support services. That is an interesting range of stakeholders who, collectively and collaboratively, provide a wonderful level of service to a great many New Zealanders who need and have a requirement for care in their own homes.

I have the great privilege of representing the Coromandel electorate, and one of the features of the Coromandel electorate is that it has the second-highest proportion of any electorate in the country of people aged 65-plus. It is a vast, rural electorate with a lot of older, mature citizens, many of whom retire to the Coromandel because they want the lifestyle, they like the communities, they like the environment, and all those sorts of things. But as they age they do often need support and care in their homes, and the mere logistics of getting around the vast geographic area of the Coromandel electorate means that it is these support care workers who are having to, in many cases, clock up a lot of miles, a lot of kilometres, a lot of time, and a lot of energy in providing the services that they do to a far-flung but ageing population. They do enormously good work, sometimes under incredibly difficult and trying circumstances, and I am thrilled that this bill goes, I think, some way, certainly, toward remedying a situation that has been in need of addressing for a long period of time.

All the evidence suggests that if people are to age well and maintain independence and seek a connection with their community and their family and their environment, more often than not they do it better if they are still in their own home. We have seen those statistics feature again and again and again, and, of course, many people who are ageing want to maintain the dignity that comes with being independent and with living in their own home. For that to occur, when they need that help and support, they are going to need the help and support of other people to ensure that they can maintain that independence and that dignity of being in their own home.

I am delighted to support this bill in its first reading. I too will look forward to the submissions that I am sure we will receive from a wide range of stakeholders at the select committee, and I am sure that the committee will work in its normal collegial and thorough way to ensure a good outcome for this piece of legislation. I support the bill and commend it to the House. I will look forward to it progressing through the House in due course. Thank you.

Tēnā koutou katoa. I rise to take the first call for the Greens on the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. We will be supporting the bill.

What this bill does is it basically implements the settlement between the Crown, the district health boards, the providers of home and community-based care and support services, and the unions of home support staff—the Public Service Association (PSA) and the Service and Food Workers Union—over the payment for the time spent by home support workers travelling between clients. It follows on from a claim that was filed with the Employment Relations Authority by the unions that time spent travelling between clients by home support workers should be paid for at at least the minimum wage of $14.75 an hour. Essentially, this is legislation to replace litigation.

According to the regulatory impact statement, this settlement will affect around 28,000 carers, the majority of whom are women, who work as home support and work in people’s homes. They ensure that people who are frail or elderly or who have disabilities can be looked after in their own homes, and apparently there are around 40,000 of those clients being cared for every year.

Home support carers provide really good value for money. It is cheaper for our health system for people to stay in their own homes rather than in hospital, and it is better for the client to maintain as much autonomy as possibility and just have some help while they are in their own home. So it is depressing, to say the least, that that value-for-money option—that cheaper option than hospital—has been achieved in part by reducing the cost of the labour provided by carers to the extent that our minimum employment standards around wages have been breached.

Carers and their unions have known for decades that the work they perform has been underpaid. We knew it in 2002, when I was a caregiver with the Waiheke Health Trust, and even way back in the 1980s, when I was a carer with the Nurse Maude District Nursing Association in Christchurch.

In May 2012 Dr Judy McGregor, Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner with the Human Rights Commission, reported on, basically, the exploitation of women who are carers, in her report called Caring Counts: Report of the Inquiry into the Aged Care Workforce. As part of that research for her report she worked undercover in an aged-care facility, and she graphically outlined how physically and emotionally exhausting the work is. The reason—and she has said it too—that there is a very low pay rate for carers is that it is seen as women’s work and, consequently, it is undervalued.

She made 10 recommendations. The first five are that the Government show leadership to deliver better services for older people; that the woefully low pay rates be addressed and, as a minimum, there should be pay parity in Government-funded service providers in the aged-care sector—including home support—between people working in home support and residential facilities and people working for district health boards; that there is a fair and consistent travel policy covering actual costs for the time spent travelling between clients; that there be a commitment to qualifications for staff in the sector, and a commitment by employers to this as well; and that the voluntary safety standards, including the Home and community support sector Standard, become compulsory. There are another five recommendations as well.

It is a credit to the unions of the people who work as home support carers that in negotiating this settlement they have attempted to address the recommendations outlined all those years ago by Dr Judy McGregor. They have also had to take groundbreaking court cases to try to address those recommendations. The Service and Food Workers Union—or, now, E tū union—and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation are taking the case for carer Kristine Bartlett under the Equal Pay Act, and, of course, the PSA and the Service and Food Workers Union have taken the case for payment for travel time for home carers on behalf of Tamara Baddeley and Jenny Goodman. This legislation underscores how important the union movement is for protecting and enforcing people’s wages and conditions on the job, not just for their members but for whole sectors. It is sad that it had to take legal action for the barest of equality to start to be negotiated and to be addressed in this House.

The legal case for payment for travel time triggered real discussion and negotiation with the Crown for a fair outcome for home support carers that takes into account the chronic underfunding of the sector, the need for quality care for those receiving home support, and also the need for stability in the workforce. I note that as part of this deal carers will not be able to claim back payment, as would be expected in a legal case. According to the regulatory impact statement, that back payment for 6 years could be as much as $261 million. Carers have foregone that because they want an agreement that will benefit themselves, their clients, the service providers—which are the employers—the district health boards, and the Government. They have sacrificed past claims to create a better future for all of them.

The deal the union negotiated includes, as well as the payment for travel time, payment to cover the cost of mileage at 50c a kilometre from March next year and 60c a kilometre from July next year. That is up from an average of 33c a kilometre. It also includes a transition to guaranteed hours of work. It also calls for clients to be allocated safe staffing levels, training for carers to a level 3 qualification within the first 2 years on the job, and, of course, pay rates that are better than the minimum wage, and where qualifications are recognised on the pay scale.

These are all incredibly important aspects of the deal. The transition to guaranteed hours of work means an end to zero-hour contracts for home carers, and it means there will be stability around their earnings. They will be able to plan their lives. Hopefully, this will also start to address the horrendously high staff turnover in the sector, which I read is as much as 40 percent. It makes sense to invest in rewarding carers who have achieved their qualifications so that there is an incentive to upskill.

The Government cannot continue to underfund home support work at the level of the minimum wage, and it is time to recognise the current and growing level of skill needed, because carers are dealing with increasingly complex needs. It is going to cost about $38 million a year, and it is good to see that the Crown has allocated this to district health boards, which will send it out to the service providers, which will pass it on to the carers themselves.

We support this bill. We also acknowledge that this will pave the way for ACC-funded carers to start to see some equity in their payments. This deal is starting to make an impact right now. The PSA journal last month had interviews with two carers who talked about the increase in their take-home pay as a result of finally—finally—being paid their travel time. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First—and, actually, on behalf of Barbara Stewart, our spokesperson for this bill—to speak on the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I would like to begin by stating first and foremost that this bill formalises in legislation an already agreed settlement negotiated between the estimated 24,000 home and community support service workers’ unions, providers, and district health boards to ensure home and community-based care and support workers receive compensation for the time and cost of travel between clients. For this reason, New Zealand First will be supporting this bill through to select committee.

Having said that, we in New Zealand First hold firm reservations about the process by which this bill came into the House and its glaring flaws in what it is trying to achieve. The bill is an example of the Government acting on the worst of motivations. Rather than delivering what is right and what is fair for New Zealand workers, the Government has chosen to take an underhanded approach and legislate one of the most deserving, most undervalued workforces out of what is rightfully theirs. The truth is that the only reason this bill is in this House is that the Government wants to stop legal action from the home and community support workforce and remove any liability for the $261 million of back payments for travel expenses to which the sector is entitled.

What is worse is that the only reason the Government wants to stop that legal action is that it does not want to set a precedent within the wider labour market regarding what can be considered work under the Minimum Wage Act. The cost of future action due to this precedent is unknown, but officials have already warned that it is significant.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Can I just ask the member to resume his seat. I have reflected on what he said at the beginning and also on a note that I have been sent from the spokesperson, but I do want to warn the member that he is not allowed to just read out a speech, even if it has been prepared by or for another member. If the member really wants someone else’s speech on the record of the House, the member can table it, but he actually has to give a speech, not read it out.

The decision to bring this legislation to the House is not motivated by a wish to help New Zealand workers earn what they deserve. Instead, it is providing a bare minimum of compromises in terms of actual expenditure in order to prevent care workers receiving what they actually deserve. In the end, it is actually stopping New Zealand workers in the future from trying to justifiably seek compensation for work they are currently doing. In fact, workers should not actually have to go to the courts and take this sort of action in order for them to get what rightfully is theirs.

At this point I would like to touch on what the home and community support workforce is actually to receive. By the interim solution, between 1 July 2015 and 29 February 2016 the workforce will be paid a figure that represents the minimum wage for the average time spent travelling between clients, and from 1 March 2016 this will change to employees being compensated at the minimum wage for qualifying travel time and receiving no less than 50c per kilometre for the qualifying time. Yet the Inland Revenue Department actually estimates the per kilometre reasonable expenditure to be around 74c per kilometre incurred by an employer—and that includes the petrol prices, as well. So if that is the case, then legislating for up to just 50c per kilometre will fail to achieve the bill’s actual designed intent and aim in the first place, and obviously that does not fairly compensate the home and community support workforce for the travel times and the cost that it incurs. Therefore, it actually shows that it represents a further example of Government legislation that claims to be having a meaningful change where, in fact, it is asking the organisations to do more with less.

If we look at Part B of the terms of the settlement—although that part is not actually included within the provisions of the bill itself, it does remain important and relevant—what it does is it focuses on the commitment from all the parties towards having a regularised workforce within 24 months following the settlement taking effect. Quoting directly from the health report to the Minister of Health related to this commitment, it sums up exactly why regulation is needed in the first place. “The regularised model is expected to be beneficial for all parties … and will ensure continued viability of HCSS as a cost effective alternative to residential care.” However, “such progress is subject to affordability and implementation occurring within available funding”. So the funding that is available at the moment, being $38 million that was put forward for the additional costs of the travel expenses in the workforce, is again asking home and community support to deliver more but without giving them any more investment necessary to make it work.

In other words, the settlement agreement and the bill, in particular, is not the Government riding in to save the day for home and community support, as it would have us believe, but rather a demonstration of how badly mismanaged home and community support is and the lack of future planning that has gone into home and community support services from this Government in the first place. Even having withheld the $261 million in the first place, the Government still cannot deliver sufficient funding to implement necessary changes.

So, yes, New Zealand First will be supporting this piece of legislation through to the select committee because it is a step in the right direction, but it is the least that can be done. There needs to be, in fact, a dramatic overhaul of the entire funding of the sector with a focus on workforce planning to futureproof New Zealand from the coming crisis in our care workforce. This needs to be only the start of a continued effort by the Government to get the funding and the organisation for this sector right and to give the home and community support service workforce the support it actually deserves. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to speak on this Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I want to bring a personal aspect to this in a minute or two, but I think it is quite important to say that the purpose of this bill is actually a result of an agreement between the parties, being the district health boards, the home support and community-based care services, and their community-based care employees. There are some 24,000 employees, as we have heard before, which is a significant number of people who are involved in this very necessary area.

My wife’s grandmother—our children’s great-grandmother—was in care in her own home, and it was very important to her to remain in her home as long as possible. I really did not have much understanding of what was involved in home care at all until I witnessed that, and it was actually during the election campaign last year. When I was doorknocking in Blenheim, I went to Julie’s grandmother every day for lunch. This lady grew up in a household with a photo of Michael Joseph Savage on the wall, so you can imagine it was quite a leap for her to have a National candidate having lunch with her every day. It was phenomenal.

To come back to the bill, though. To witness on a daily basis the home carers coming in and to see how they bring great pleasure to those people remaining in their home and give them the necessary care that they need—what really struck me about the whole thing was not just the skills involved in what they did but the enjoyment they got out of providing that care to those people. I think that is something that I certainly had not really appreciated until I witnessed it, as I said, on a daily basis. Unfortunately, she is no longer with us, but those people are out there doing this on a daily basis for other people.

We have an ageing population. We are going to have more people who will require these kinds of services, and it is incumbent upon us to actually have a workforce that can keep people in their homes, should they desire to stay there, for as long as possible. We need to provide a career pathway, and that means remunerating those people to the level they deserve for the services they are providing, and this bill goes a long way towards that. There is a transitional phase, then it moves into an ongoing and permanent phase, and I think that is really to be lauded. So it is with great pleasure that I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

It does sound as if all parties will be supporting this bill, so I thought I may make some reflections on the problem that we are trying to solve here. My reflection is that the straitened financial circumstances that the health sector so often finds itself in sometimes leads to very poor strategic decision-making.

When we look at mental health, we have moved from an era when the approach to people with mental illness was to institutionalise. We all recognise that, actually, that is not the correct approach for most people, so we closed down the big psychiatric hospitals, but then we did not invest properly in creating the community-based support services that were required to replace them, with the consequence that now we have both community-based services and acute units that are struggling to cope and chaos for people with mental illness.

We know that the need for secondary care and the cost of secondary care could be saved by a much better investment in public health services and in primary care services, yet do we make that investment? We do not. In fact, in the last several years under this Government, it is those precise services that have borne the brunt of funding cuts. So, rather than taking us closer to a situation where we make the smart, strategic choice to invest in keeping people well in the community, and thereby saving costs in secondary care, in actual fact we exacerbate the need for secondary care. We exacerbate the problem because our thinking is constrained by short-term considerations. That is how this problem has arisen.

We have had a strategy now for at least the past 15 years, I would say, called Ageing in Place, where we say: “We actually do not want to consign all of our older people to require rest home and hospital-level care as soon as they start to struggle to cope in their own homes, so let’s instead bring services to them because that is the best thing for them, and it is also the best thing in the long run for our services.” But what has happened is that we have made that our strategy and yet have failed to put in place the appropriate level of community-based services that older people need to be able to remain in their own homes. This bill addresses one of the facets of that issue.

Several speakers have mentioned Judy McGregor’s report. Judy McGregor’s report Caring Counts addressed this as one of the most significant issues because she said that it was an injustice. She said that it added to the precarious nature of the work by community-based support workers.

I put the case to the House—and I have heard other speakers in this debate do so—that we have got away with failing to appropriately reimburse for travel costs principally because this work has been carried out mainly by women. That is, I think, a pretty sad reflection on decision makers in the health sector over a significant period of time.

I want to reflect too on the fact—and Judy McGregor makes this point in her report—that this has had a differential geographic impact. For community-based support workers in an urban environment, the failure to be adequately reimbursed for travel costs may be a relatively small consideration, but for those workers in an area like the one I live in, the travel time and distance between clients may be vast and it may actually mean that it is completely non-viable to do that as a job. That certainly has been the case with costs both to the workers and also to the clients.

I am a member of the Health Committee. I look forward to those submissions, and I just want to conclude by saying thanks—thanks to those workers for the work they do, for the perseverance and courage they showed in taking the cases that led to this situation, and for their generosity in the settlement that this bill legislates for. Thank you.

I am standing on behalf of Labour to express our support for the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I think I will start by just taking us through a little bit of a time line in respect of how we got to this point. In May 2012 the Caring Counts report came out. In November 2012 Tamara Baddeley bravely took a test case claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers. She won that case, and then in September 2014 Cabinet approved this change, but it has taken quite some time for us to get to this point. Just reflecting on what the member Stuart Smith said earlier about the fact that we need to recognise the importance of the work that is done here, that we do have an ageing population, and that it is going to become increasingly important moving forward, I have to question then why the Government has dragged its feet to a large extent. It has reluctantly bowed to pressure from the unions and adopted Labour’s fair and sensible policy to pay home support workers for the time they spend travelling between clients. It is only fair, because these people are paid so poorly that at the very least they deserve to be paid for their entire time, which is also that travel time in between clients.

Before I got into Parliament in 2008 I had the privilege of managing a research project around the non-regulated Pacific health workforce. Many of the people whom we worked with and whom we interviewed were actually providing home and community support. As has been pointed out by a number of people here this afternoon, that workforce is highly feminised. It is also very ethnically diverse. In places like Auckland we have a large number of women working in that sector who are from minority ethnic groups, who are Pacific, and the research also showed us that not only were those people working in those positions just to get a wage but their primary reason for being in that workface was that they genuinely cared about the people they were being given an opportunity to work with, and yet they did recognise that they were poorly paid. So the workforce is highly feminised, ethnically diverse, and very underpaid.

This bill does not go to the full extent in terms of recognising the work that these people do. It is just a minor change that in some way will help them in terms of remuneration, but it goes only a very small part of the way. At some stage the Government, or whoever is in Government, is going to have to better recognise the value of the work that these people, who are largely women, undertake. I think one of the major factors here is the amount that they get paid, and the fact that they need to be recognised through remuneration. But there are other things too, such as the investment in workforce development for the people working in this sector. It is about the type of support to be put in place so that they are able to do their job as well as possible.

We support this bill, but we are disappointed that the Government has dragged its feet on this one. Moving forward, as a whole Parliament I think we are going to have to think how we can better recognise this workforce, and how we can afford as a country to recognise them through remuneration. I look forward to the day when we can debate some legislation that allows us to have that fuller conversation, rather than—even though it is really important—just recognising the travel time in between clients, which these people will now be paid for, thank goodness.

It is a pleasure to take a brief call on the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I am not a member of the Health Committee, much to my chagrin, but I know that my colleagues on the committee will do a good job of considering this important piece of legislation.

I want to commend the comments made by my colleague and friend Stuart Smith about the important work that home and community support service workers do in our community. I have been reading the regulatory impact statement, which notes that every day 40,000 people in this sector provide support in our community, and they do a sterling job.

The background to this piece of legislation is an interesting one, and it is neatly contained in the preamble to the bill that is before the House. Of course, the background to the bill is that proceedings were filed by the Public Service Association in the Employment Relations Authority. The question, in a legal sense, turns on whether or not travelling between appointments is work for the purposes of the Minimum Wage Act.

It is interesting to read the regulatory impact statement prepared by the Ministry of Health, because it notes that that is actually a reasonable point. There is actually a reasonable chance of success. The regulatory impact statement notes that “Independent legal advice indicated that there is a good argument that in-between travel time constitutes ‘work’ under the Act and a test case has a reasonable prospect of success.” Of course, if that was the case, “then providers would be liable to pay their home-care workers at, at least, the minimum wage rate for their in-between travel time and potentially six years of backpay”, which of course, as the regulatory impact statement notes, “was the case in the IDEA Services Limited v Dickson”, which is the sleepovers case that people will be aware of. “However, providers have expressed concern that they cannot sustain such an outcome as it would be difficult to remain viable if they had to fund or part-fund in-between travel time. That could have a negative impact on the delivery of health-funded HCSS.”

We find this legislation before the House as the result of negotiations begun in April 2014 and a settlement reached between certain unions, the district health boards, and the Crown in August 2015. The legislation is required to give effect to that settlement. The aim of the legislation is to provide for an enduring, affordable, and sustainable solution.

I know that my colleagues on the Health Committee will be looking forward to the submissions as to whether or not this legislation will, in fact, give effect to the aims that I think all parties around the Parliament are looking for. With those brief remarks, I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is my pleasure as a member of the Health Committee to speak on this first reading of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. To begin, can I say: ka pai, E tū. E tū, as part of its membership, includes the Service and Food Workers Union. It was the Service and Food Workers Union member Tamara Baddeley, who, with the support of her union—and I want to acknowledge John Ryall—filed a case against Healthcare New Zealand. To support the Service and Food Workers Union we also had the Public Service Association. (PSA). So I want to acknowledge our unions, which actually fight for the rights of our workers and highlight the inequalities in legislation.

In fact, this bill is the result of an inequality in the legislation, which was the Minimum Wage Act of 1983. That is, in fact, the legal opinion that the then human rights commissioner, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner, Judy McGregor, obtained. So she supported the Service and Food Workers Union. She supported the PSA. In addition to her support, she got Russell McVeagh to write a legal opinion that basically said that there was a legal argument that travel between clients constituted work under the Minimum Wage Act of 1983.

That is incredibly symbolic because what it does is it highlights that the people who work in the home and community-based care and support sector—and that is 28,000 New Zealand workers who work in the sector, who service over 40,000 New Zealanders, and we have heard today about whom this particular care and support service sector provides services to. We are talking about older New Zealanders. We are talking about New Zealanders who have disabilities. We are talking about New Zealanders who choose to be careful in their homes. We are talking about a vulnerable population that, in fact, is supported by vulnerable workers.

A lot of people have talked about the context of this legislation and the fact that the people involved in this piece of legislation are not paid sufficiently. Hopefully, as other colleagues have alluded to in the debate this afternoon, this provides the impetus for the Government to not only address this settlement that was reached between the Government and the PSA and the Service and Food Workers Union in August last year, which was then ratified by those union members, but also recognise and acknowledge that the 28,000 people, in particular women, who work in the sector deserve a living wage. So we will put that on the table today. They deserve a living wage.

They deserve a living wage because—actually, we should not rely on the fact that they qualify because they are paid the minimum wage to care for the people whom we have talked about in the House today, who deserve to be serviced with best-quality support. Well, part of being serviced with best-quality support is making sure the workers who are undertaking those tasks are remunerated appropriately.

If we look at the progression of this piece of legislation, it was started in November 2012, when the Service and Food Workers Union, the PSA, and Tamara Baddeley went to the Employment Relations Authority and asked it to refer the matter to the Employment Court. The progression from this issue being referred to the Employment Relations Authority then gave rise to a period of negotiation. From November 2012 we come to April 2014, when the Government decided in earnest that it wanted to negotiate with the Service and Food Workers Union and with the PSA.

What I want to note is that prior to that decision being made, the Government’s position was pretty clear. I will quote from the Minister of Health at the time, Tony Ryall. He said that this matter between home-care employers and home-care employees was for them to resolve, it had nothing to do with the Government, and it was not the Government’s responsibility. So it is good that we are in the House today and the Government is taking responsibility for ensuring that our home and community-based care and support workers are compensated appropriately for travelling between jobs. That is the context of their work. Actually, their car is their office. So I am glad that the Government has changed its position and that it is actually now supporting the unions and what the unions are trying to achieve.

From the negotiations, which started in April 2014, they reached a resolution by August 2014. I want to commend the leadership of the unions. Also I commend Judy McGregor at this time for standing up for the workers and then for transparently presenting that settlement to the workers. The ratification of that settlement has enabled the bill that is before the House tonight.

One of the interesting things that I have found in looking at this particular piece of legislation this afternoon is that, actually, they are having the same arguments over in Europe at the moment. The headline is “British trade unions welcome ruling against Spanish company, saying home care workers could see benefits”. This particular article was published on 10 September 2015. In the European Court of Justice, a Spanish trade union took a case against Tyco, which was a multinational fire and security company that closed its network of regional offices in Spain in 2011. The interesting thing about that is that the staff were not paid to travel from their homes to install these security systems. Sometimes they had to travel for up to 3 hours away from their homes. So the finding of the European Court of Justice—and I want to read the judgment—is: “During the necessary travelling time—which generally cannot be shortened—the workers are therefore not able to use their time freely and pursue their own interests. The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of workers themselves.” So it is kind of a different rationale but, actually, it is the same logic.

Of interest to me is that Dave Prentis, who is the general secretary of the UNISON union in Britain, said that he thought the biggest impact of this ruling is going to be on home-care workers—“Tens of thousands of home-care workers [who] are not even getting the minimum wage because their employers fail to pay them for the time they spend travelling between the homes of all the people they care for.” So what I am hoping for from the legislation that we are enacting here today is that actually workers around the world who are working in the care and support sector are going to be recognised for the contribution that they make to all of our societies to care for those most vulnerable, particularly.

We have all been very clear about how supportive we are of the care workers because of the people whom they are serving—older New Zealanders. We know through the demographics of our country that New Zealand is ageing, but what I am hoping is that the Government does the next step and actually progressively increases the wages of this sector so that they do not continue to be the minimally paid workers in New Zealand. The value that we place on those workers is actually the value that we place on older New Zealanders. I think that is the challenge not only for this Government but, actually, for Parliament in the future.

So I see this as the beginning of having appropriate compensation for our workers. What I am hoping is that this is not the end of the story and the Government has not done this just as a settlement because it was taken to court but that, actually, it takes this sector seriously and it remunerates this sector appropriately and that we value its contribution to New Zealand. The way that we value it is by ensuring these workers are paid sufficiently. Kia ora.

It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill in its first reading. I think it has been canvassed or traversed quite well this afternoon as to how this bill has come about. It does, or will, enact a negotiated settlement between service providers, support workers, unions, the 20 district health boards, and the Crown around the issue of payment for time and costs for those workers when they are travelling between clients.

I acknowledge, as my colleague Mr Bishop pointed out, that in the regulatory impact statement officials noted that they had cited at least one legal opinion that suggested that the authority may find that travel between clients was indeed part of the classification of work under the Minimum Wage Act. So I would suggest that rather than having long and protracted court proceedings, the parties did come together and negotiated an acceptable outcome—an outcome acceptable to all parties—around the middle of the last year. This legislation will give full effect to that.

Importantly, around this particular issue—and I am not looking to canvass elements outside the specifics that this bill is addressing—it will give an enduring solution, one that is affordable and, therefore, sustainable to address this issue of travel between clients and the recompense for the time and cost of travel.

So what we will see is from 1 July 2015 employees will be paid for the time they spend travelling. From 1 March next year they will be recompensed towards the cost of that travel. That gives certainty around that future, and that is balanced in the negotiated settlement with an agreement, therefore, that those employees will not and cannot pursue wages payable under the Minimum Wage Act 1983 from before the commencement of this bill. I think this is an effective and clearly agreeable outcome for all parties involved, and I commend the bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Health Committee.