John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Aire to the House. What could be a more difficult job to be given than that of Minister for Social Protection and Minister for Health during a recession and at a time when the demands for the services increase, especially in the case of the Department of Social Protection, for all the understandable reasons, while at the same time the tax base which has to support it goes down? It is a very difficult task and the Minister should not think we are not appreciative of it. With a task such as that, as Rahm Emanuel said, no good crisis should go to waste. There are times for creative thinking, and perhaps creative destruction of some old processes, and ideas that look outside the box in terms of the way we deliver certain services.

I have stated, more in the context of health debates over the years than in the case of social welfare, although I believe it applies in both, that spending money on health is spending money on social welfare. Public spending in general is not wasteful but wasting public money is always wasteful. It is never a good idea to waste any resource. All resources should be used efficiently. The maximum amount of benefit must be extracted from them and their impact should be maximised at all times.

Historically, the way we have devised social welfare systems, and certainly the way we have devised our health system, has not maximised the outputs we get for the substantial inputs we make. I am being a bit of a "Quixote" and tilting at windmills in putting some thoughts into the Minister's head for contemplation during 2014 rather than for amendments that might be made in the course of the debate on the different Stages of this Bill. What do we need? We need more jobs but to get more jobs we will need, among other things, increased inward investment and to get that we will need increased competitiveness. We also need increased revenue to support our very necessary social programmes.

One must ask if the way we use the money currently deployed for jobseekers is maximally efficient. I am not one of those people who believe that everybody on jobseeker's allowance is a sponger. We had the experiment in this country. We had virtually full employment. When jobs were available people rolled up their sleeves, took the jobs and worked, except for a very small core of people. We had close to zero unemployment here during the height of the economic boom. People want to work. The argument that is trotted out that people are habitual welfare spongers is unfair and untrue, but are we creating the maximum impact for the investment we put into this programme? I believe we are not.

I would love the Minister to examine an ambitious, innovative, wholly different, disruptive approach, as it were, in which we would look at the amount of money we give people on jobseeker's allowance and say it provides a little safety net, it does not give a great wage but is the best we can do under the circumstances. I understand that. In the great majority of cases people receiving it would much prefer to have a job where they are making more money, paying taxes and contributing. Is there not a way, and I do not mean a JobBridge type idea but a much more fundamental approach, that we would engage with employers in the private sector and ask them if they would be prepared to top up to at least the minimum wage or, more appropriately, to what they pay people who are doing a job, the amount of money we give them, which would be the equivalent of what that person would be getting as their jobseeker's allowance? If €270 or whatever was deployed to a company and the person who owned the company topped up that figure by another €150 or €200 to make a truly living wage, the person in receipt of the jobseeker's allowance would make more money and pay taxes, and the company would have a highly competitive member of its workforce which would give it a competitive advantage vis-à-vis other parts of the world.

I have asked that of a number of people I know who are substantial employers throughout the country and they said they would snap the hand off somebody who made such an offer. They would love to be able to increase the numbers of people in work. It makes absolute economic sense. It is good for the worker, the State, the company and the economy. There are people in Brussels who would object but we have another large group of people who are unemployed, namely, lawyers. We have many unemployed and under-employed lawyers as a result of the collapse in the conveyancing business and we could use them to gunge up the people in the European court for years as they disputed our attempt to get everybody back to work and by the time they possibly won their case, the recession would be over. I put that thought into the Minister's mind and hope she will give me some credit for it when she implements it.

When I came back to Ireland in 1993, I was stunned to find that even with the relatively high income I had, my family qualified for allowances in respect of my children. I understand all the arguments about it but one wonders whether a portion of that allowance could be given in a form of transactional currency that is only expendable on children. While the great majority of families in receipt of the allowance need it for general household expenses at a time of great stringency, some are abusing it. This is not like the old food stamps idea; technology has moved on. There are many ways a percentage of the children's allowance could only be spent on children's food, clothing and so on and not as a currency that could be transacted to directly benefit the adult.

I believe the Minister's opportunity to stamp her name across history will come if she critically examines the issue of mandatory retirement in our public service. Senator White has introduced legislation, which I was honoured to support. When Bismarck introduced the old age pension in Germany in the 1880s, the average age of death was 42. One received a pension at 65 years and if one lived to that age, on average one lived for another two years. Now the average life expectancy is the late 80s. The system is based on a biological premise of a life expectancy which is wrong. I will not get into the issue of whether people should be able to avail of discretionary retirement but people who work in the public service who have no desire to retire are being forced to become dependants on the State at the age of 65 and that is wrong.

I refer to "perverse incentives", a phrase we use in medicine, where a well meaning incentive is put into a system and it has an unexpected to outcome. Will the Minister comment on the wisdom of setting a deadline of 1 January as the date beyond which the bereavement allowance will no longer be paid and what implications that might have?