Mr. John Bohan:

I will deal with the various comments made, starting with Deputy Ó Caoláin's point. As he said, I cannot comment on Government policy regarding the budget and budget measures but I can provide a number of facts which might put the issue into some context. As Deputy Dowds mentioned, we still have one of the highest rates of income support. I know there are issues about income support versus services which were mentioned by other members but child benefit remains one of the highest universal payments in Europe, and we can provide statistics on that. That means when that is combined with selective instruments such as the QCIs, we are still meeting the national anti-poverty strategy target, which is that child income support is to meet 33% of the adult rate. Under those measures the Government is still meeting the target of approximately €62 per child in disadvantaged households, and that is the amount of resources available.

There is a major issue regarding the income transfers versus the available supports, but in looking beyond the effects of the immediate measures one should probably examine the existing structural issues. Evidence produced by our research programme showed that approximately one-quarter of children lived in jobless households, therefore, 50% of children in consistent poverty were in jobless households. The fact that we had a very high rate of jobless households pre-existed both the boom and the bust in the economy. That suggests that what needs to be done about child poverty is in the structural area of getting parents back to work, improving supports, and improving levels of activation. That sets the tone for some of the changes being made in the Department.

On the system of income support, the advisory group has identified a clear need to examine the area of reform and has put forward its report for consideration, including by this committee's sister committee, the Joint Committee on Education and Social Protection, and looks forward to hearing the views of that committee.

Senator van Turnhout and Deputy Dowds made a point about moving beyond the terms of reference of the advisory group. Yesterday, our chair said that the terms of reference did not allow the group to move beyond income support to the question of whether better value for money would be achieved by moving into child related services. There is evidence that those countries which put more effort into services get better results in terms of child poverty. The reason for that is that it addresses the structural factors I just mentioned.

Deputy Dowds asked if there was any evidence for that. The Department undertook a value for money review of the child support system published in 2010 in which we produced evidence from different countries which showed where the better results were being obtained, and it correlated with higher levels of spending on services. There were better outcomes in many other countries but one would have to take that on a case by case basis.

Clearly, the income support system and child benefit are extremely important to people with regard to how they plan their own expenditure and so on. However, were one to put it into some other service, one almost would be obliged to evaluate that specific service itself. A very good example is the one mentioned by my colleague, Ms Moira O'Mara, about the abolition of the early child care supplement payment and its replacement by the early childhood care and education, ECCE, programme. While that was universally acknowledged as a very good example of how one would do this in practice, one almost would be obliged to make that analysis on a case-by-case basis.

If I may turn to the points made by Deputy Conway, she mentioned the difficulty of joined-up government and she is not in the first person to make such an observation because I recently re-read something from 2002, namely, the strategic management initiative's Delivering Better Government, which identified this to be one of the more difficult areas of public sector reform. While it acknowledged many changes within Departments, it observed this was one of the most difficult areas. I believe the Office of the Minister for Children was established around that time and as my Department actually set up and assigned staff to that office, we participated wholeheartedly in that initiative. The Department of Social Protection also has had fruitful collaborations with the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. I mentioned the national children's strategy implementation group earlier and we also are working on the children's longitudinal study and the area-based poverty initiative, into which we obviously are trying to put our input. The decision regarding the budgetary measures was announced with a transfer of funding arising from some of those savings from the social welfare Vote into a child care initiative, as well as the area-based initiative. In that context, we are engaging on a number of fronts with our colleagues in the Department of Children and Youth Affairs on how best to implement that. In addition, in an example that demonstrates how the children's framework is important for my Department, when the Government accepted our Minister's recommendation to reset the new national poverty target, we also recommended setting a child poverty subtarget. However, rather than selecting a target at that time, we thought it best to go through the process of interdepartmental and stakeholder consultation to set the subtarget in a more robust framework. In a way, this comprises a concrete part of my Department's plan to have better joined-up government. Finally, the Department of Social Protection organises an annual social inclusion forum, which will take place next week, to cover many areas that emerge from the national action plan for social inclusion. It will include a workshop on child poverty and hopefully, some of the issues will emerge from that.