The workshop was divided into two panel discussions. The first panel was dedicated to the impact on social protection systems of megatrends such as demographic trends, changes in the labour market and climate change, while the second was dedicated to potential solutions to ensure social protection systems are able to cover new emerging risks and have sufficient resources.

As regards changes to the labour market and the emergence of new forms of work, the need to ensure social security institutions have full information about the work performed was highlighted as crucial to provide adequate coverage. This is true of platform work, where some countries have already introduced legislation to ensure they receive necessary information. The proposal for a Directive on the working conditions of platform workers could further help improve this. However, this need for information is also true in other forms of work such as self-employment when performed as a side activity.

Touching upon the ageing of the EU’s population and the shrinking of its working population, the improvement of labour market participation of women, persons with disabilities, and other excluded groups was agreed upon as one of the best solutions. Indeed, there is little to be done to increase resources for social protection systems without allowing more people to contribute to the systems.

Climate change was highlighted as an important emerging risk which is likely to impact lower income households more severely, and while best practices exist, more consideration needs to be paid to this rick and how to include it in our systems.

Overall, in order to improve the resilience of social protection systems to these megatrends, it was agreed that the efficiency of the systems should be improved, due to the small margin of additional resources which can be expected.

In order to do so, the possibility to make the most of digitalisation, by improving the exchange of data including in a cross-border context, and by using digital tools to prevent and even nudge fraud, therefore limiting loss of resources. At the same time, it was agreed that digitalisation alone was not a panacea.

Finally, the need to consider social protection as an investment in people rather than an expenditure was stressed by all speakers. Indeed, more focus is put today within social protection systems on the importance of early intervention, whether this concerns allowing job transition before unemployment, preventing accidents at work, ensuring healthy ageing or improving pension literacy of young people. 

Following the workshop, Yannis Natsis, ESIP Director, explained “I believe our workshop showed that social protection systems in Europe are flexible and able to adapt to emerging risks and new trends in the labour market and the economy. ESIP stands ready to further support the High-Level Expert Group on the future of social protection.”

The programme of the event can be found here. The presentations given at the workshop are now available on our website.