Williams Poto: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 16 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9016. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Tēnā koe Mr Chairman. As I look across the Chamber I can see many of my colleagues who have had an association with the home and community sector in their previous lives so what I am about to say will come as no surprise to them I am sure.This bill is really about equity on a whole lot of levels. It is about equity for pay to recognise that home and community care is as important if not more important than many other roles out there. It is about equity for gender because 91 percent of the people who perform the work in the community are women. It is about equity for training and for the recognition of the training that many of these home-care workers undertake when they are undertaking some very advanced personal care.They may be involved in percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy feedingor they may even be involved in supporting medically fragile children with skills and training that are second to none but are not recognised currently in their pay rate.It is also about the equity of recognition of the status of the care that is delivered in the community that it can be as good as if not better than care that is provided in institutions. Let us face it many of our older people really value the opportunities to stay well in their own homes and in the communities of their choice.This bill we support wholeheartedly because it recognises all of those inequities and it does go some way towards addressing them.This bill also recognises the work that has been done by unions by the district health boards by the Ministry of Health and by those home-care service providers themselves to come to an arrangement that sees us going some way towards having fairer wages for workers in the support service.If I can talk a little bit about what I understand of the background that has got us to this place: over the last several years we have engaged in a process of reassessing the levels of care that the recipients of this care require.As our health care dollar is stretched even further assessments have been made that the amount of time to deliver specific pieces of care—whether that be around looking after someone’s home preparing someone’s meal doing personal care such as showering or helping people with their shopping or around issues of social isolation—the time required to complete those functions has been diminished somewhat.That is really around our ability to deliver more services for the time that that home-care worker has. As a consequence of that that home-care worker may be delivering services to more people in the course of their 8 or 9-hour day—or however many hours they may work across the day—than they would have done in the past.What this has required is more travel because as a consequence of having more clients to work for in your normal hours of work the amount of travel you are doing has increased.So it is right that we should recognise that travel between our clients is actually part of our work. We should get paid for that and this bill addresses that.It does not address necessarily the issue of what we should be paying. Given the sensitive nature of the care that is delivered in my view we should be paying these very caring people a lot more than we are. Part 1 clause 4 really relates to that settlement that agreement that was made by those four parties. Also Part 2 clause 10 speaks to a very important principle that has been used in this bill which is that no home-care service employee be financially disadvantaged. That has underpinned much of the discussion and debate—that they should not be financially disadvantaged—which has led us to the point where we are now in a position to pay for travel between clients. With reference to Part 2 clause 6 this bill will also extinguish some of the current claims that home-care service employees may have. That will settle that.Part 3 clause 28 also looks at amending the Minimum Wage Act to provide an exemption to the requirement to pay wages at the minimum rate. Also just on that note Part 3 looks at amending three Acts including the Minimum Wage Act which will then require home-care services to pay for travel at no less than the minimum wage. Clause 29 contains the amendments to the Employment Relations Act. Because that travel time will now actually be counted as employment time it will have significanceto employment agreements. Also it relates only to workers who attract a wage—it does not apply to salaried staff. Also clause 30 contains the amendment to the Holidays Act which of course has reference to the fact that the travel time is now included as work time. So it has a reference to the Holidays Act.You cannot look at the work of a home-care support worker in isolation just around the funding stream that may come from the Ministry of Health or the district health boards. One thing that the Health Committee did manage to get included in this legislation is the work that is conducted for the Accident Compensation Corporation. Because many of the workers will be working across a range of clients who will have their care managed by district health boards the Ministry of Health or the Accident Compensation Corporation to leave ACC out of this legislation would have been unfair. It would have meant that you would have two strata of payments which is not right and is not appropriate.I just want to finish by commending the bill and commending all of those home-care workers who have spent so many hours really fighting for this to come to the House and to actually be enacted. I pay homage to them for the work that they do. Many of us know—we have older parents who are well cared for in their homes. Without that they would have to be in institutions and we know the value of having our loved ones in their own residences in the community. It has far better outcomes for them their well-being and their quality of life and it certainly has far better impacts for us on our health spend. So in conclusion I support this bill and I commend it to the Committee.