Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Cork County Council and Cork City Council have committed to take on 60 people each on the first stage of the Jobpath. We have had very good co-operation from them. In terms of Cork city and county, approximately 6,000 people are participating in a variety of schemes supported by my Department, including community employment, in which there are a few thousand participants. More than 2,000 participants are engaged in community employment and more than 2,000 are participating in the back to education allowance scheme in Cork city and county. Nearly 1,000 people are participating in the back to work scheme. Cork has a strong participance rate in these schemes. As the Deputy will know, I have had an opportunity to visit quite a number of community employment schemes in different parts of Cork city and county. This is a developmental process. As the economy recovers and we have space in the budget, I hope it will be possible to increase the incentives. Participants are offered 19 hours a week on the scheme I mentioned. The opportunities for people to train and on the vocational developmental side and the education side are good.

On the issue of ensuring work pays and the Deputy's example of a family of, say, two adults and three children, roughly 74%, or 317,000 people, claim for themselves alone. In other words, they have no dependants. They get €188 a week and if they are long-term employed they also get the fuel allowance. Some 5%, or 22,000 people, are couples who have no children, 4% are couples with one child, and 9%, or 40,000 people, are couples with two or more children. It is among that latter group, particularly if one has a rent supplement, that there is a strong potential for people to be unemployed or to fall into the poverty trap. If a family of two adults and three children have a rent supplement, the rent levels in Cork for a three of four bed-roomed house, depending on the part of the county or city one is living in, could be anything from €900 to €1,200 or €1,300 a month. The Deputy can do the maths. If one is getting social welfare benefits for a family of five and one is getting the back to school allowance and all the other allowances, the benefits could mount up to close to €30,000 and if one adds to that an average of €1,000 a month for rent supplement, then would bring the package of benefits up to over the €40,000 mark. We have done those figures and we do them regularly, and I can send them to the Deputy. It means that for somebody to take up a job, he or she has to get that amount, but if one takes a job paying €42,000 or €38,000, one will also pay some PRSI and a small amount in taxation. One will retain child benefit and one's medical card for three years if one has been long-term unemployed. There is a bit of a myth that one will lose it, but that is not true. Employers seem to believe that as much as people who are unemployed.

If members come across people like that, they should let the local social welfare office know and also ask the employers to let the local social welfare office know. We have a social contract with people who are unemployed. We will support them with income support and do everything we can to help them to get back to work, but they have a social obligation to the wider Irish society to take up reasonable offers of work. That is what the whole activation process is about. We have an obligation to assist the person who has unfortunately become unemployed but they have social obligations, a social contract, to the wider society to make themselves available for work. It would be very helpful to us if employers would let us know if they have make reasonable offers of a job and cannot find anybody to take it up. As we work through the Intreo process, if an employer says he or she wants two people to work at X, we can look at the profiling we are doing and see if we have some people who fit that profile. It is then up to the employer to interview those people and possibly offer them a job, and we will expect people to take reasonable offers.

To return to the housing supplement issue, that is the critical and main reason I would like that scheme to be transferred to the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. If an individual is on the local authority rental accommodation scheme, RAS, or on the traditional social housing rented scheme, that person and their family would be on a differential rent. If that person is in receipt of social welfare, they would be able to calculate what they have to contribute in terms of social welfare income into the house. If that person is then offered a job, they can do the calculation, and the council would do it for them, of what the differential rent would go up to if they took up the job. The rent supplement scheme in the Department of Social Protection was designed, and this is provided in law, as being only a temporary support while somebody is out of work. That is the legal basis of the scheme. If a person takes up a job while being on rent supplement, and Deputy Jim Daly gave the example of a family of five, the rent could easily be €1,000 a month plus. That family has to make up that €12,000 of rent and that is where the poverty trap lies, because they will lose that support. If the scheme were transferred to the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, such a person in the future would only pay an enhanced differential rent. The extra cost to that person might be only an amount of €20 to €30 a week because that is the way local authority differential rents work. That would be a critical piece of reform. I can brief the committee on how that reform is going but I do not know if we have the time.

Pages 5 and 6 of the members' information pack sets out the data of the number of people with families who are on the live register. I remind members that more than 90,000 families are lone-parent families but not all of them would be on the live register.