Clause 9 - Compliance regime for statutory sick pay and statutory maternity pay: Great Britain
National Insurance Contributions and Statutory Payments Bill
2:30 pm
Ms Dawn Primarolo (Paymaster General, HM Treasury; Bristol South, Labour)
Good afternoon, Mr. Griffiths, and welcome to the Chair. The Committee has covered several issues while debating clause 9.
For the sake of the record, and with the Committee's indulgence, I will clarify a point that I made this morning in response to the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk). To make it clearer for Hansard, I will repeat what was said. The hon. Gentleman made a point about typographical errors, including one in the regulatory impact assessment. I am impressed by his thorough perusal, but his suggestion that there are typographical errors there and in the regulatory impact assessment are not correct. I think I gave him the correct answer, but I also told him that he was correct about the typographical errors, so I will put that straight.
First, the hon. Gentleman suggested that, in the part of clause 3 that is to be inserted in paragraph 3A of schedule 1 to the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, we had missed out an ''or'' at the end of sub-paragraph 2B (a). The Inland Revenue does not believe that an ''or'' is necessary because the meaning is clear without it and the punctuation follows similar provisions in other parts of the Bill. I think that I inadvertently used a double negative,
which might have given the opposite impression. I apologise—I have been swapping between ''employers'' and ''employees'' and between ''primary'' and ''secondary''.
Secondly, there was a reference to employees paying the secondary national insurance liability. That was in the regulatory impact assessment, in the context of clause 3. That is quite right, and it is not a typographical error. The clause describes one of the few occasions—it was the subject of our debate—on which employers' secondary liability is transferred to employees, who, as the hon. Gentleman rightly pointed out, would normally pay only primary national insurance liability. None the less, he made a good point, although it was not correct. I apologise to hon. Members if I inadvertently gave a different impression. I think the record will show that I am making the same point, minus the double negative.