5.

That submission cannot be upheld. There are more persuasive arguments, I think, for the view that the benefit in question lies within the scope of the social security schemes which under the directive are to be immediately subject to the principle of equal treatment, in particular, the scheme regarding invalidity. As is well known, invalidity is the physical and economic condition of the person concerned resulting from a reduction in his working capacity which has repercussions on his earning capacity. Sometimes it is so serious that the invalid needs assistance from other people in his daily life. In such cases the social security schemes of the Member States generally grant the invalid a special benefit or increase the principal benefit so as to make up all or part of the cost to him of such assistance. The British scheme is different. The two benefits which it provides are paid to two separate persons: on the one hand, the invalid, on the other, the person who furnishes him with care and assistance. Having said that, let me return to Article 3 (1). According to that article Directive 79/7 applies to ‘statutory schemes which provide protection against... [the risk of] invalidity’ (subparagraph (a)) and to ‘social assistance, in so far as it is intended to supplement or replace’ the invalidity scheme (subparagraph (b)). There can be no doubt that in that provision the accent is placed on two points: the Community legislature's use of the word ‘schemes’ (whereas, when it desires to exclude a measure, it has recourse to the much narrower terms ‘benefits’‘advantages’ or ‘entitlements’) and the fact that it expressly mentions social assistance provisions. It follows, in my view, that the directive applies to a coherent and comprehensive system of protection against invalidity: it must therefore include all the benefits, however defined and organized in the national legal systems, which make up the relevant scheme. All the benefits: that is to say, even those which, like the benefit at issue here, are paid to a person other than the invalid. There are at least two reasons for which that method of payment should not have the effect of exluding this benefit from the invalidity scheme. The first is that its payment logically depends on a situation of invalidity in the sense that the existence of a person covered by the scheme is a condition sine qua non for its payment, as Counsel for the Adjudication Officer admitted at the hearing. The second is the clear economic link between this benefit and the benefit paid to the invalid; that is to say, the invalid derives an advantage from the fact that a subsidy is paid to the person who provides assistance. The essential point is that the mechanisms used in the United Kingdom (allowance paid to the person who provides assistance) and in the other Member States (increase in the benefit paid to the invalid) may be different, but their objective is in substance identical (see the interim report of the Commission of the European Communities on the implementation of Directive 79/7, COM(83) 793 final, 6.1.1984). It may also be remarked that the effectiveness of the directive would be seriously compromised if the limits of its application were defined by the way in which a benefit was paid. It is clear that if that were the case a Member State would need only to make a few slight amendments to its legislation in order to exclude numerous sectors of its social security system from the application of the principle of equal treatment. That solution is not affected by the Adjudication Officer's argument based on the fact that the principle of equal treatment was to be implemented gradually; as I have pointed out in Section 3 of this Opinion, the benefit in question is not one of those (occupational schemes, etc.) which were to be brought into conformity with the principle in a second stage. Nor is there any more merit in the argument that the directive applies only to members of the working population, so that a benefit paid to a person who is not a worker must be considered to be excluded. It seems obvious to me that in a case such as this the persons in favour of whom it is intended that the principle of equal treatment should apply are disabled workers. It is on the basis of the connection between the main benefit paid to invalids and the benefit paid to persons caring for them (but intended to assist them indirectly) that the conditions governing the payment of the second benefit must also be the same for men and for women.