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

on behalf of the Minister of Health: I move, That the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill be now read a third time. This bill formalises one part of a negotiated agreement that resolved a claim filed with the Employment Relations Authority around payment for travel time and costs for home and community support workers. The out-of-court settlement has led to an agreed minimum rate of payment and an agreed formulae to determine payment amounts. This bill formalises those arrangements and provides an enduring, affordable, and sustainable way to compensate support workers for the in-between travel they do when supporting older people, disabled people, and those recovering from injury or illness with their household management and personal care needs.

I would like to acknowledge the role of the settlement parties in working together throughout the passage of the bill to develop a piece of legislation that is clear and workable and delivers on the intent of the settlement agreement. The Health Committee has ensured a good outcome through its close engagement on the subject matter and its flexibility around process. The Parliamentary Counsel Office and other officials worked professionally and with considerable goodwill throughout what has been a very tight time frame, and I acknowledge their contribution.

This bill represents an important milestone in recognising the valuable work of people who provide care and support for many New Zealanders. It will benefit around 24,000 care and support workers who assist older people, disabled people, and those recovering from illness and injury with personal care and household management. This bill is a very positive investment by the Government in some of the lowest-paid care and support workers in the health sector. They will benefit from a total Government investment of around $38 million a year, or approximately $150 million over a 4-year period. This bill is a priority for this Government, and I am aware that some other countries are also dealing with this issue and will be watching our progress with interest. I am pleased to commend this bill to the House.

I am very pleased to be able to rise and speak to the third reading of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I have to say I am a little disappointed that the Minister’s contribution was so brief in view of the fact that this bill is so historic and so life-changing for many of those who are going to be the beneficiaries of it.

I want to begin by congratulating those who had the courage to bring this bill to the House, because of the battles they fought to ensure there was a test case on behalf of hundreds of home-care workers in New Zealand. I particularly want to acknowledge Jenny Goodman and the Public Service Association, with the support of the Council of Trade Unions and others who backed her to bring case—a test case—to ensure that our home-care workers were going to be able to receive payment when they travelled from one job to the next. I think that if it does nothing else, it shows the value of belonging to a union. A union can take up on behalf of a vulnerable worker and workers the situation that they face and can put forward the fight for them, and that is exactly what happened in this particular case. We have a number of other cases that are being settled, and they have been driven by the unions that could see the unfairness of what was happening to their membership.

In fact, this bill has come about also because of a ruling by the Human Rights Commission. It has taken a long time to get to this point, but what I was pleased about was that once an agreement had been reached between the employers, the unions, the Crown, and those who are providing the services, then there was a rapid action here within the Parliament. The bill was introduced on 24 September 2015. It received its first reading on 13 October 2015, and was referred to the Health Committee. We reported the bill back on 15 December, just before Christmas, as one of the last actions of the Health Committee.

The Health Committee worked very hard on this bill and made sure it was reported back before Christmas, because there had been agreement on what should be in this bill, and we wanted it out of the committee, ready for debate and passage in this Parliament when Parliament resumed. So here we are debating the third reading of this bill on 18 February. That is fast in terms of what this House can do. We are very pleased that we are going to be able to finish this bill today. It will receive the Governor-General’s assent in the next few days and will become law.

There were not a lot of submissions to the select committee. That is because agreement had been reached—it had been thrashed out as to what this bill would achieve. But I did think it was important that these major submissions from the employers, from the companies and from the organisations that employ our home-care workers, were in unison in terms of what they said in their submissions. Access Homehealth’s submission said: “We support the Bill and believe it provides major benefits to both our, and the Home and Community Support Services (HCSS) sector, clients and employees.” Healthcare of New Zealand Holdings Ltd said: “We are supportive of the Bill due to the benefit it will bring to our employees (and clients). This Bill represents a significant positive change for the Home and Community Support Services (HCSS) sector.”

The New Zealand Federation of Business and Professional Women also made a submission. It had a wider interest. In fact, it said it supports the bill because: “we are committed to representing the interests of working women and advancing and empowering women in the workplace.” It liked the fact that this bill was going through but it also said it wants to see: “[an increase in] funding to Aged Care Providers to provide pay equity for all aged care workers in accordance with the Equal Pay Act 1972.” That is something that has not yet been achieved. So when we are talking about this bill we are part-way there; we are not fully there because we do not yet have pay equity for these workers.

These workers are vulnerable workers. These are overwhelmingly women workers, and these are women who work for the minimum wage—the minimum hourly rate. They go out and they work on behalf of our families: our old mums and dads, our grandparents, and people who are in need of care in their home and in the community. That is how we are able to keep so many people within the community—because of this army of women who go out and support them.

They support them in many ways. You know, for some people—and I am sure you will be aware of this, Mr Deputy Speaker—having a person come to your home to do some home help for you, or just to talk to you, can mean more to your overall health than anything else. Many older people are lonely in their own homes. They do not have a lot of contact with people, but when their home-care worker, their community worker, comes into their home and does work for them, talks to them, and becomes a friend to them, it has a double whammy for that person. So we need to value these workers, who do such a magnificent job for us.

So what does this bill mean? It means that those workers are going get payment when they travel between one job and another. What is interesting is that we have never ever doubted that those who travel from one job fixing your plumbing, to the next job fixing the plumbing up the road, should not include in the cost of travel in what they are paid. But we have not thought that it was important that those on low incomes, on the minimum wage, travelling in their old car, and filling it up using their money should be paid to go from one job to the next. This bill will ensure that they are paid at least the minimum wage when travelling between clients. They will be paid the minimum allowance of at least 50c per kilometre for that travel.

This bill does have a number of things in it. It removes the ability for employees to return this issue to the Crown. It also removes the right to claim back-pay. That was not decided by this Parliament; it was decided by the settlement between those who were the parties to it. They sat down and said: “How can we be fair to the taxpayer but also fair to those women who are providing this service and paying for their travel?”. So they came to an agreement. They could, I suppose, have gone and argued that there ought to be years of back-pay for the work they had done, and it would have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, I suspect. But they came to an agreement that the right to claim back-pay would be removed.

The bill also means that the definition of “employee” is to be covered. So we now are pretty clear what an employee is. It also does something that we have not done before, and it is that we also included in the amendments that we made—and we made a number of amendments to the bill at the select committee—an amendment to include ACC in this legislation. Many of those who provide home services in the health sector also provide home services for ACC. That came from changes that the Health Committee made, and I am very pleased with that change as well.

This is a red-letter day for those who have been fighting for years for fairness for our home-care and support workers in respect of payment for travel. Let us not think, though, that this is the end of the story. I too would like to see pay equity for those many, many women providing this service. They are just as important to us as those we say are important in trades and in professions. They are the backbone of the type of health service we are going to be able to afford in the future.

I commend this bill to the House. It has the full support of the Labour Party.

I am going to make this a relatively short contribution partly because I think it has actually been quite well articulated by the previous speaker, Annette King, and by others as this bill has gone through the House, but partly symbolically as well in so far as we have moved very swiftly as a select committee to get this bill back into the House. As was noted previously, it was brought back to the House just before Christmas and obviously is to be put into effect.

This Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill is ultimately a process that we as a Parliament are going through correctly and rightly. But as has been noted by other speakers—and I am sure it will come—this is putting into effect an agreement by other parties outside of the Parliament: the Crown, the district health boards, the employers, and, ultimately, the employees, particularly those represented through the unions, who work in home care. They got around the table, they discussed, they negotiated—I was not privy to all of the discussions, but I am sure there were many, many that were had to bring this agreement into effect. We as a Parliament have been asked to put that legislatively into effect, and from the very moment that it has come into the Health Committee, all the political parties—National, Labour, New Zealand First, the Greens—have worked incredibly hard to make that happen.

I just want to record my thanks to all the committee members, once again, for the work that they have done, to all the officials for the work that they took on and the advice that they gave us in a very timely manner, and to all the submitters—I found them very articulate and that they brought home very clearly what this is all about. Ultimately, this is about the home-care workers. I think it is just fantastic what they do—absolutely fantastic. So to them—thank you. Keep up the good work. We know that there is always more to be done, but we hope that this little bit of legislation is acknowledged for the import that it has.

Following on from what the two previous speakers said, this bill follows a claim filed with the Employment Relations Authority in August 2013. The claim asserted that the time that home and community support employees spend travelling between clients is work for the purposes of the Minimum Wage Act 1983. Because of the claim, the Ministry of Health entered negotiations with district health boards, providers of home and community-based care and support, and certain unions on behalf of members and non-members. The result is a good one. It is this settlement.

Labour is pleased to see the settlement of this case finally brought before the House after the Human Rights Commission ruling several years ago that travel time should be remunerated. The National Government has reluctantly bowed to pressure from unions and adopted Labour’s fair and sensible policy to pay home support workers for the time they spend travelling between clients. It is great that we are in the position whereby this House in its entirety is supporting this bill; it is just unfortunate that the Government dragged its feet on the way to doing this. We have to give credit to Jenny Goodman and the Public Service Association, which bravely took a test case claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers.

Even with this progress, this settlement is still a long way from dealing with the historical underpayment of home and community support workers. Many of these people are on wages close to the minimum wage or on the minimum wage, actually, and, given the work they do, they deserve to be on a pay grade similar to nurses.

My colleague Annette King made the point around pay equity. Why is it that this valuable form of work in terms of home-care support is undervalued when you stack it up against other professions? This is an area that needs to be looked at in terms of pay equity. We know that the vast majority of people undertaking this work are, in fact, women. It is a highly feminised workforce, and these women deserve to be paid the value of the work that they are doing.

The wider funding of home support services also needs to be addressed, as home support remains the only service not planned and funded on a national basis. The lack of funding does push down wages in the sector. The lack of funding also means, as the Home and Community Health Association has stated, that “home and community support will increasingly become an option only for those who can afford it.” Many people in the last year have found their home support levels have been cut, and this should be of growing concern to all of us, given that we have an ageing population and that many more people, moving forward, are going to be requiring this type of care. If we cannot adequately fund it now, then what position are we as a country going to be in in 5, 10, 15, or 20 years’ time?

What is unfortunate is that the reality is that the Government has cut $1.7 billion out of the health system over 6 years, and the workforce is bearing the brunt of this gross underfunding—stretched to capacity. Stretched to capacity, and we are putting our workers in this workforce into dangerous situations because of that. There are still issues with the settlement. New organisations that join up will not be covered by this deal, and that is an issue that needs to be addressed.

I think it is important to note that the bill does not cover Part B of the settlement, which was the “Establishment of a Regularised Workforce and Review of the Home and Community Health Sector”. I can say, having been the research manager of a Pacific non-regulated health workforce development research project in the past, that that conversation around the regularisation of the workforce was something that was being had, I think, 6 or maybe 8 years ago and continues now. What we need is not only for the workers in this workforce to be paid adequately for the valuable work that they do but also for safeguards to be in place to ensure that they are protected.

Home and community support employees will receive payment from 1 July 2015 for time spent travelling between clients, and I just want to note, too, that from 1 July 2015 to 29 February 2016 the payment will be calculated using a figure that represents the minimum wage for the weighted average of the time spent travelling between clients. Also, I want to note that from 1 March 2016 the payment will be calculated based on the employee’s qualifying travel time, being the weighted average time per client visit assigned to the travel band applicable to the client’s location, and this will be prescribed in regulation.

I just want to go back to what was discussed earlier about the value of this workforce, and just again—because I do not think we can say it enough—say that this workforce, historically, has been undervalued and some attention needs to be paid to how we value this workforce better. Remuneration is definitely one part of that, but it is not the only part of that.

I want to point out that when we were undertaking the research on the Pacific non-regulated health workforce, one of the things that came up time and time again was that these women who were undertaking this type of work were doing so because of the fact that they had a heart for the clients and the people that they were working for. It was not just a matter of undertaking a job for the sake of undertaking a job; there was actually that passion and commitment to the work that they were undertaking and the care that they were giving to the clients whom they were looking after. So I want to acknowledge the fact that this is a dedicated workforce, and so that is another reason why we need to place value on this.

We need home carers and, actually, during that time when we were undertaking that study, that was one of the concerns moving forward—whether or not we would have the appropriate workforce to be able to cater to the needs of our ageing population. So it is not just about valuing them; it is also looking to the future and seeing how we can encourage more people to take up this type of work. As I said, remuneration is a part of it, but all of the working conditions that they are exposed to are a big part of making sure that they actually want to continue working in that workforce and that we can attract more people to work in that workforce.

As I said before, it is a highly feminised workforce, and this really does illustrate the issues with pay equity that we have in this country. I mean, if there is any workforce that we should be concerned about in terms of pay equity, it really is in the health sector and it really is the unregulated workforce.

So we are, as I said earlier, pleased to see that the settlement of this case has finally been brought before the House after the Human Rights Commission ruling several years ago that travel times should be remunerated for. It is just so unfortunate that it has taken so long for us to get to this point. Again, I want to give credit to Jenny Goodman and the Public Service Association, which has bravely taken a test case claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers.

I will just reiterate something that Annette King said earlier, which is that this demonstrates, really, the importance of having a unionised workforce, being involved in a union, and being a member of a union, because, actually, for an individual to be expected to take up a case like this alone would be overwhelming for anyone. But to know that you have a union and know that you have support behind you to be able to do that makes it a lot easier, and it actually brings us to the point where we can have successful results like we do here today.

Labour is definitely supporting this bill, and can I just acknowledge each and every person who has played a role in bringing this to the House and ensuring its success. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to be speaking in support of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I also just want to acknowledge the service providers, the support workers, the unions, the Crown, the district health boards, and everyone who has been involved in this piece of legislation.

To keep sick, elderly, and disabled people in their own homes for as long as they are able to stay there depends on having these wonderful people who go into their homes and do the great work that they do every day in supporting them. You know, the clients set their clocks by the visits. These people turn up, they have smiles, and they have a great attitude. I think it is great to see this piece of legislation going through to secure a better future for these health and disability care workers.

It has been a real pleasure to work with the Health Committee and with the other parties on getting to the stage where we are putting this piece of legislation in front of the House for the third time, and it is my pleasure to support it. Thank you.

It is my pleasure to take the first call for the Greens on this, the third reading of this bill. I just want to go back and restate the purpose of the bill; I think everybody is pretty clear about what it is. It is, essentially, to give effect to an agreement that has been reached between the unions, the home and community support services providers, and district health boards to ensure that home support workers are paid for the time spent travelling between their clients. I want to remind this House that this came about as a result of negotiations after a case was taken to the Employment Relations Authority by the Public Service Association (PSA) on behalf of home carers, with home carer Jenny Goodman fronting that case. I thank her for her efforts, and the efforts of the PSA. Essentially, it was a test case for something like 20,000 home carers. The PSA took this case to say that the travel time between clients was work and that it should be paid for, when in most cases that time was not paid for. Essentially, the low rates of pay for the home carers would be basically slipping under the minimum wage if you took that time into account.

The home carers in this country care for something like 40,000 people who are chronically ill, are elderly, or are people with disabilities. They care for these people in their own homes. We must remember that caring for people in their own homes is actually incredibly good for those clients. It ensures that they have independence and that they have dignity. But we also need to recognise that caring for them in their own home with an underfunded, underpaid workforce is much cheaper for our health dollars. Why is it cheaper? It is cheaper because it is built on the exploitation of women workers—carers who invest emotionally in their clients and their clients’ well-being, but who are also low-paid and have limited, if any, guarantee of working hours from one week to the next.

Lodging the case with the Employment Relations Authority triggered negotiations because travel time is work—certainly in this situation. For example, it is like a previous case that the Service and Food Workers Union—or it might have been the Service Workers Union, as it was then—had taken with the disability service carers for their sleeping over, so that sleepover time was classified as work. That case, you may remember, resulted in huge back-pay claims for, again, what was largely a female-dominated workforce.

In this case, rather than let the Employment Relations Authority make the decision and potentially direct back-pay, the Ministry of Health, the district health boards, home-care support service providers, the unions—the PSA, E tū, and the Council of Trade Unions—sat down to negotiate the settlement. That settlement means that home-care support services and district health board home carers will not get back-pay. That back-pay is estimated to be around $261 million, for 6 years—back-pay for all those workers. It is likely that the deal that has now been negotiated for travel time is going to cost around $38 million per year, added to the health budget. But I think it is worth it because you cannot rely on exploitation to provide a service.

This bill will mean that home carers are paid at least the minimum wage for travel time. They will also be paid a travel allowance of at least 50c per kilometre starting in March this year, going up to 60c per kilometre in July. In exchange for this settlement there will be no back-pay, travel time payment or travel money. In exchange, there is Part B of the settlement agreement, which is not covered by this legislation. Part B sets up a director-general’s reference group, and I am glad to see that it will be set up. It is outside this legislation. What that director-general’s reference group is set up to do is work alongside the employers, the district health boards, and the unions and the Council of Trade Unions, again, to look at a transition to regularising the workforce, and for that workforce to transition to regular working hours. It is also to look at safe staffing levels. It is also going to look at training for carers to level 3 up and ensure that that qualification can be attained within the first 2 years. This is because it is not just about the home carers; it is also about the quality of the service that they provide, and, essentially, it is also about those qualifications being recognised as part of the pay scale. That is Part B of the settlement. It was the quid pro quo. I am glad to see that it is going to happen.

I think we have to recognise and thank the unions for taking this proactive approach of engaging in a conversation looking at the future—exchanging back-pay compensation for future benefits. I think that is the difference between an industrial relations lawyer, who could have taken the case and could have gone for back-pay claims—the difference between that and the unions is that they take the sensible, collaborative, and collective approach, looking for practical and pragmatic solutions. I think we need to note that these benefits will be passed on to home carers who are not union members. It is good that that happens, because otherwise they undercut those who are union members. We should really recognise that in lots of different sectors, unions negotiate pragmatic deals that benefit their union members but are also passed on to others in the sector. I also think that there are some limitations on whom this bill applies to. We need to be encouraging new home-care support services that may be being set up at the moment and that are not listed to come under this agreement, because otherwise they run the risk of undercutting other providers and forcing wages down in the tender process with district health boards.

I have to say that the underfunding of the aged-care sector—and others have mentioned this—is an ongoing problem that needs to be resolved. We cannot continue to provide a service that is, essentially, based on wages that are too low and services that are provided for free by a largely female workforce. I note that the next case being taken is that of Kristine Bartlett and the E tū union—the equal pay claim for a rest home worker. That too is subject to a negotiation by the unions with the ministries, to look for a way forward to ensure that we can pass on pay equity to the entire workforce. That is an ongoing situation, but I really, truly do want to see equal pay for aged-care workers within the next couple of years, at least. I will look forward to seeing that legislation come before us. In the meantime, I commend this bill to the House.

I am very pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the third reading of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. New Zealand First definitely supports this bill, just like other parties in the House. It is sound legislation, and it should have happened years and years ago.

As others have said, this legislation is the result of a settlement on behalf of the Public Service Association (PSA) and home support worker Jenny Goodman. The proceedings were lodged with the Employment Relations Authority in 2013, claiming that the time a community support worker spends travelling between clients is work for the purposes of section 6 of the Minimum Wage Act. We know that when tradespeople and sales reps are travelling between clients, that is considered to be their work, so it was only logical that this had to be related to the home support area.

We in New Zealand First are disappointed that it took a claim like this to get the Government to act on such an important issue. It is an issue that in this House we have all been aware of for a long time. We have received numerous petitions. There have been protest meetings, and demonstrations on the steps of Parliament. So it is no surprise that this was an issue that did need to be solved. It really should have been solved proactively rather than having to wait for a court case like this, because we all know that this settlement comes mainly from a desire to prevent court action and the payout of costly back-pay for travel.

This legislation is a start, but it needs to go further. In New Zealand First we are quite disappointed that the mileage rate remains at 50c per kilometre and has not increased in line with the Inland Revenue Department recommendations of 74c per kilometre, but it is a start. And we know that it is an area that does need revisiting. We are in support of this bill, as I said. However, we see this as only the start of a complete overhaul of the home-care and home support sector. We would really like to see staff properly recognised for the valuable work that they do, including receiving appropriate pay. We do remain concerned at the working conditions of care workers, and we know that, looking forward, a stable workforce is absolutely required.

We were very pleased to read that there will be an investigation into guaranteed hours of work. There needs to be that. It is not the support workers’ fault if one of the people whom they are caring for goes into hospital for some time, but it comes off their salary. There needs to be some recognition of training and qualifications, and, of course, as others have said, the rates of pay need to be looked at. We know of many workers who have worked in this sector for years and they have received very little in the way of pay increases. We are really hoping that this is going to be addressed within Part B of the settlement agreement. We know that this is an area that is going to be vital in the future because the number of people who are coming through who are going to require care is enormous.

We were pleased that all of the parties agreed to investigate the impact of a regularised workforce to ensure the sustainability and the stability of the sector. In its submission the PSA made some suggestions as to what would constitute a regularised workforce: firstly, guaranteed hours for the majority of the workforce; secondly, paid training to enable support workers to gain level 3 New Zealand certificate qualifications; thirdly, wages paid on the required level of training for support workers; and, lastly, a case load and casemix workload mechanism to ensure a fair and safe allocation of clients to support workers. As every other party in this House has done, we in New Zealand First support those recommendations. We will see that more and more people are going to rely on the support of home and community-based care and support workers.

New Zealand First would also like to thank those thousands of home and community-based care and support workers who work tirelessly every day to make their clients’ days just a little bit brighter, a little bit better. We know it can be really challenging work—it is not easy—but I know for a fact that these people are passionate about making a difference and they are highly skilled, and we should appreciate the very important job that they do. Their dedication in their work keeps many of our elderly—many of our seniors—out of rest homes. We all know that people want to live independently for as long as they possibly can, and this group of workers is absolutely essential to ensuring that this happens. So we acknowledge the fantastic work that they do—absolutely important. We were so pleased to see that ACC has actually been included in this settlement, because we know that those people who are looked after through ACC need the support, too—absolutely essential.

In New Zealand First we are very happy to support this bill, but we say that this should not be the end of the debate on the working conditions of our home and community-based care and support workers, and we will be looking to see that this is only the start of that journey. Thank you.

The Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill is an important bill. It implements a settlement agreement between the service providers—the support workers—and their unions, and the 20 district health boards and the Crown to pay for the time and costs for workers travelling between their clients. It is not only important to the workers themselves but also very important to their clients, who I know have felt for the people who come into their homes and support them so very well.

Along with other members, I want to acknowledge officials who have assisted the Health Committee and the Crown in the finessing of this bill. I actually want to acknowledge Barbara Stewart’s speech. I think that Barbara shows a great understanding, compassion, and an affinity for the needs and the circumstances around this. It might be rare to commend another member, but I do want to acknowledge and congratulate her on the approach that she has taken towards this bill, along, of course, with my colleagues on the National side.

Being electorate-based MPs, many of us have day-to-day contact with our constituents. For people like me, in a rural, provincial constituency, this issue around workers having to travel quite considerable distances between their clients has been a matter that has been of concern to us. So, I am very proud that the National Government has brought this bill to the House, and I support it, along with other members. Thank you.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I just want to clarify whether this is a 5-minute or a 10-minute contribution.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: It is normally the Green Party that takes the first call in this slot.

That is right. Yes.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is the Green Party expecting to—

💬 Eugenie Sage: Mr Lees-Galloway can have 10 minutes.

It would be my pleasure.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: There is your answer. Congratulations.

Very good—thank you. Labour backs having an economy that works for all of us, not just for the privileged few; a country where our kids can hope to one day own their own home; a job that pays well; security to live a fulfilling life with the people we care about; and a world-class health system that is there for you when you need it. Labour, in short, stands for the Kiwi Dream, and it is our mission when we are in Government to restore the Kiwi Dream and security and opportunity for all New Zealanders.

It is not just the Labour Party that is the champion of the Kiwi Dream. It is the wider labour movement, as well—working people who have chosen to work together collectively through their unions to get a better deal and a fairer outcome for themselves and for other people working in their industry and across New Zealand.

This is a prime example of the labour movement at work—the labour movement striving to ensure that all New Zealanders can realise that Kiwi Dream. So I want to acknowledge the Public Service Association (PSA) and E tū for the work they did in bargaining with the employers, then taking the test case, and then sitting down with a centre-right Government and getting a positive outcome, not just for the union members but, actually, for everybody who works in this sector and for the people that they care for, and leading the way for other work that has to happen in order to provide fair pay and conditions for people working throughout the health care system.

I think this is a wonderful victory for working people, and it is a demonstration of the important role that unions still hold in the modern New Zealand workplace. Even during a period of time when the Government has changed the law to diminish the role of unions to make it harder for them to do their job and harder for them to get positive and fair outcomes for their members and for other workers, these unions—the PSA and E tū, supported by the Council of Trade Unions—have been able to achieve a fantastic outcome. And it is good for the industry as well.

Denise Roche made a very good point, and that is that this was a bargaining situation. Things were traded, and an absolutely legitimate claim for back-pay was forgone by those workers so that they could establish a system that is going to be fair for themselves and for future generations of people working in the home-care and community support sector. That is not the outcome you get when you get the sort of cowboy, “no win, no fee” lawyers. It is the outcome you get when employers and the Government work with unions, which have as much of a vested interest in the long-term survival and success of the industries that they operate in as the employers, the owners, the Government, and everybody else.

It is tripartism at its best—the Government, the employers, and the workers working together for a positive, win-win outcome that is good for everybody. So I want to congratulate everybody involved in getting to this point. Yes, there have been times when pressure has had to be applied. Yes, there have been times where people have had to go to court. There have been times when, perhaps, it has felt more like the parties were on opposite side of the fence than on the same side, but they worked through it. It took time. It took strong people like Jenny Goodman standing up and being prepared to put themselves in the public view, and eventually, after years and years and years of hard work, they got there. The fact that they got there under a National Government is no mean feat, and it should be acknowledged. They have done extremely well to get there at this point in time. What they did is they made sure that the public was on their side, and that, frankly, the Government of the day, no matter what colour it was, had no option but to work with them and to get the appropriate outcome put into place.

There is an aspect of this legislation that has not been spoken about all that much that I think is really important, and it is important in the context of the ongoing issues and the other matters that still need to be addressed. That is the fact that by virtue of the legislation that we are passing today, the home and community support workers are defined as employees. That is important, because not everybody working in New Zealand is entitled to the rights that we ought to be able to take for granted. Not everybody working in New Zealand is entitled to a minimum wage. Employees are, but contractors are not. Not everybody in New Zealand is entitled to join a union and to bargain collectively. Employees are, but contractors are not. So defining these workers as employees is actually astonishingly important because it provides them with basic rights that every worker in New Zealand should actually be able to take for granted.

I want to acknowledge that before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee right now is David Parker’s bill, the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill, which would provide the right to the minimum wage to all workers in New Zealand. We also need to start work on matters such as dependent contractors—people who are called contractors but who are actually fundamentally employed by one employer. They are employees in all but name and in all but the rights that they get.

These are issues that this House urgently needs to address, and this legislation, in a limited way for these people, makes really important progress. That is another thing that we should celebrate, and we should use it as a prototype for future work to extend those rights and those privileges to other people working in New Zealand, as well.

This is a day to celebrate, and I do not want to hold this legislation up, so I simply want to end by saying that unions are relevant. Unions are still, even under this Government, gaining enormous successes for their members and for workers right across New Zealand, and today is a day on which we should celebrate unions and unions should celebrate the work that they are doing.

As a member of the Health Committee it gives me enormous pleasure to rise in support in this third reading debate on the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. As others have already indicated during this debate and in previous debates, this is a bill that was given priority through the Health Committee. I am delighted to report that the select committee members worked collegially to bring an outcome back to the House in a timely fashion, so that the bill could be given its third reading early in this parliamentary year.

It is a very good bill. I know that the home-care and health workers in my electorate of Coromandel will be looking forward to its implementation. I commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Firstly, like previous speakers on this bill, I want to commend the work of home-care support workers. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the work they do and the value that they bring to our communities.

Many of us have had our lives touched by the work of home-care workers, whether they are coming in to support elderly parents, people with disabilities, people at the end of their lives, people who are injured and are temporarily off work, or people who are injured and need long-term care. Being able to stay in your home with the people you love around you—you cannot put a value on that. You cannot put a value on what being in your own home brings to your ability to have a good quality life.

What support workers do in terms of supporting really good care—the best kind of care; supporting our families to be around their loved ones, supporting people to be in the homes and communities of their choice—is completely invaluable, and to acknowledge that we are going some way to recompensing them fairly is encouraging. Unfortunately, we are going nowhere near far enough, because the value they bring to the lives of the people they support is without measure.

I want to talk a little bit about the type of work that these home-care workers do. It is not just about keeping someone’s home clean and making sure that their meal is prepared. It is not just about home help or personal care. It is often very, very intimate care. It is often very high-level, highly trained care. I know that when I was working in the sector myself we had people who were able to support medically fragile children to be at home. We had people who were able to support a family to care for their loved one at the end of their life. There is nothing more personal than that. We had people who were able to support people with serious skin conditions to be able to bathe and dress and then be in a position to get on with their day.

Support workers actually provide for and facilitate people to live a life like you and I have. They are able to provide support for people to dress and to get on with their day, whether that is in education, in work, or in study. Without our home-care support workers our ability to do what we want to do, to have the choice to live the lives that we want to live, would be greatly diminished. I cannot speak more highly of that.

Previous speakers have talked about the agreement that had been negotiated and mediated and settled between the unions who represented the workers, the home-care providers, and the Crown agencies that fund the work. It is encouraging that what we are doing is really giving effect to what is already an agreement that is in place.

But there is another part of the agreement that I hope, some day, we will be able to effect—two things. Firstly, it is about regularising the work and ensuring that these workers actually have the ability to have security in their work and security of payments. Currently, because their work is client-based, they do not have that security. It would be great to have the ability to provide that security. The other aspect of the agreement that I really hope we would be in a position to support is the review of the sector as a whole. In previous speeches I have talked about why we are at this place now, putting into effect the travel time provisions.

What has happened over time—and it has been several years since I have actually been in the sector myself—is that there have been different forms of assessment for the needs of our clients. This is a process that I believe started with the Auckland District Health Board a few years ago when it was looking at the way we assess care for our older recipients of care at home. The district health board was looking at who was in the best position to assess the needs of clients and then deliver that care, and what came out of that process was the fact that we could assess someone’s care. Where in the past we may have been delivering, say, 2 or 3 hours’ worth of care into that home, we could assess that care and change the way we delivered that care to a shorter period of time. This meant that in the normal workday of a home-care worker, where previously they may have had two or three clients, now they might have five or six clients. The distances they are travelling and the time they spend travelling have, therefore, increased. I think this is a point to make for what may happen in the future as well—that, increasingly, our home-care workers will be required to become more mobile, not less.

I think this is a good thing that we have identified that the travel is actually work. It is an essential part of what they do and, increasingly, it will become more and more a part of home-care workers’ lives to actually be engaged in travelling as they service more clients.

There is not much more to say on this bill. I really am encouraged that we have traversed this with some speed through the House, that we actually gave it due consideration, and that the Health Committee was able to ensure that work with ACC was also included in the bill, which is very important. Our home-care workers are also often working with ACC clients and it would be unfair and imbalanced if they were not included in this.

Just on the final note, I want to say, again, I really acknowledge the work that support workers do. I hope that one day we value their work in the same way that we value the work of other people who provide types of support in our communities, such as our first responders. The work that first responders do has a value in our community, and I would like to see that we as a Parliament and as parliamentarians really try to set the bar high for our home support workers, that we raise the status of their work in our communities, and that they have some equity with the work that other professionals do. It is a great pleasure to support this bill, and I commend it to the House.

It is a pleasure to take the final call on this bill. This bill implements the settlement agreement between the Crown, district health boards, service providers, and support workers. This is a very important bill. The home and community support workforce is a workforce of 20,000 people servicing and serving roughly 40,000 clients.

In the next few weeks, as part of the agreement, the second stage of the reimbursement formula will kick in—as of March. It is a formula that looks at time and the cost of travel. Time will be assessed as the minimum hourly wage times the qualifying time, with the qualifying time being 8 minutes and 30 seconds times the number of visits. The cost of travel will start at 50c times the qualifying distance. The qualifying distance is 3.7 kilometres times the number of visits. This bill goes some way to valuing the efforts of our home and community support sector. It does so by pay recognition, a formula that fundamentally measures time and distance.

I want to recognise what the sector does that is also valuable but cannot be measured by time and distance, and it will probably actually never be well measured in a formula of this kind: a smile, a warm touch, and human contact. These are all very important. They are not in the formula, but it is our belief they are just as important, and it is our hope that pay recognition goes some way to acknowledging this important sector and the invaluable work that it does. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.