Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will take the Deputy's question about lone parents first and will use an example to illustrate the point I wish to make. Let us take a lone parent with one child who is offered a job which pays €300 per week. If that parent applies for FIS, he or she will get an additional €120 per week. More and more lone parents who are now in work are very significant beneficiaries of FIS. The significance of that is that if a lone parent is offered extra hours or a higher rate of pay, for instance, he or she can take that up because the FIS payment is static for a year, as the Deputy already pointed out. We are now up to date with current and under-review FIS applications. Quite a big backlog had built up.

Self-employed people who become unemployed or farmers who suffer a catastrophic change in their income circumstances, due for example to bad weather, can now bring information to the Department on their current circumstances. In the past, such people had to provide information on previous years, including their accounting records, tax returns and so forth. People in that category now have quite a significant potential entitlement to a social welfare payment.

On the FIS, we would like to make the system more flexible. The advisory group on tax and social welfare is, at the request of my Department and the Departments of Finance and the Taoiseach, looking at the interactions as they apply now with regard to FIS to try to make it as attractive as possible for people to go back to work. We have not had any further major systems changes since we last discussed this issue, except that we are now bang up to date, which is enormously helpful to people.

Of those who exited the one parent family schemes in July 2013, some 1,500 or 24% transferred to family income supplement, FIS, while others transferred to the jobseeker's allowance. Let me emphasise that next year we will spend in excess of €280 million on FIS which is an enormous help to families who are offered low paid work. Recently I was on the radio programme, "Today with Sean O Rourke" in which Paddy O'Gorman had live clips from the social welfare office in Navan. Two or three of those interviewed were men with partners or spouses and children who said that around Navan much of the work on offer was minimum wage which was for single people, but in fact, with a FIS top-up the income of a couple with three children in which one partner worked 39 hours a week at the minimum wage of €8.65 per hour, would be an additional €225 a week. Neither employers nor people who are unemployed understand that. There is a commitment to pay it for a year after which time it is reviewed and will depend on one's circumstances. The top-up of €225 a week for a person who works for 39 hours a week on the minimum wage makes it comparable with other work. In all of the new Intreo offices we now prepare for people "a better off in work" statement. The Deputy may have seen an example of it on the day we were in Limerick. That allows somebody to put in their details, including partner and children and to show his or her entitlement to FIS, having worked for 39 hours at €8.65 per hour. A single parent with one child who earned €300 a week would get a top-up of €120. It is a significantly generous payment. That is the reason that lone parents, in particular, are turning to it. Many employers use the minimum wage as a baseline but pay two or three euro above it

I did not answer one of Deputy O'Dea's questions. We have more than doubled the number of case officers working with unemployed people on activation measures. We are considering working through some external partners and a tendering and information process has been under way for some time. There was a meeting in the Department in early January for further information on potential tenderers but because of the very significant numbers of people who are still unemployed and the opportunities that are there, I would be anxious to increase the actual number of case officers dealing with people. The number has doubled.

I will now deal with the issue of urgent needs payments and the supplementary welfare allowance scheme. An applicant for a payment under the supplementary welfare allowance scheme now has an appointment for a meeting in offices that have converted to the Intreo system. The actual number of supplementary welfare allowance payments has fallen very dramatically because people now come in with the correct information. I think Deputy O'Dea might be aware of it now from the way the system is working in Limerick, the people can be dealt with and go on to their appropriate payment very rapidly, sometimes without recourse to SWA at all. What we are also doing is that as the Intreo offices roll out we are having community welfare officers on hand in the large Intreo offices to deal with people who have special needs payments. In fact the volume of people on supplementary welfare is falling very dramatically.

We issued guidelines to all the staff in January, setting out recommended maximum amounts for supplementary welfare payments. The recommended maximum amounts do not affect the discretion available to individual officers if he or she comes across particular hardship.

The urgent needs payment is a payment that can be made to persons who would not be entitled ordinarily to SWA, for instance people affected by the aftermath of the recent floods or a domestic fire in which their immediate needs may not covered by insurance. It is possible to make urgent needs payments for absolutely required domestic items such as a cooker, help with the heating system or in a fire or flood with food, clothing, fuel and so on that may have been destroyed. In that case the legislation also provides that the urgent need payment can be recovered in whole or in part if the person is working or the loss is subsequently covered by insurance. Last year the amount of money spent on special needs payments was a relatively modest €102,000. The payment on the ENPs last year was €35.6 million. In 2014, we have provided an Estimate for €31.3 million, a reduction of about €4 million. The Deputy may recall that community welfare officers worked for the HSE and we supplied the funding. More than 1,000 of them joined the Department of Social Protection in October 2011 and are now fully integrated into the Department. Many of them have now become employment officers because they have very important and significant skills and experience of interviewing people. We are grouping the resources of the community welfare officers in the new Intreo offices to which people come in regularly. That has actually led to very significant efficiencies and, as a consequence, reductions in expenditure. In fact many of those people are now working helping people to get back into employment.