Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Department of Social Protection produced figures and for 85% of the live register there is an incentive to take up work. The change being made is the move from rent supplement to the housing assistance payment. It will be like a city council differential rent. The rent would be related to one's income, for example 15% of one's income after a certain figure as opposed to losing everything if one works more than 30 hours. The intention is to move to this housing assistance payment which will be income related. That would remove that. That will be piloted in Limerick around March and the aim is to move it further afield. That is the major change, moving from social protection to local authority responsibility for it.

The family income supplement, FIS, fills 60% of the gap between income and target income. It should bridge the whole gap for families with children, and there is also the retention of the medical card. There are efforts to try to tackle that trap. There has been a review of the FIS to see if more can be done in this area. It is tricky. As we saw in the UK, there were attempts to reform its income-related measure; it is now four years on and the UK Government has still not been able to implement the change. The idea was perfect in theory but it seems to have proven to be a disaster in practice.

I agree with the comments regarding measurement of success, and this year we will look in a more granular fashion at the issue. We started with the aspiration to provide 100,000 jobs and improve competitiveness, and this year we will look beneath that to develop measures to cover a suite of options. For example, with regard to entrepreneurship, we will look to provide an indication of how we are doing in the area. Having implemented the suite of measures, we could consider how we are doing with the big goal. That sort of thinking will be introduced as part of this year's plan.

With regard to ranking of universities, with many of those measurements we need to look beneath rankings. We look at innovation in universities, and we are doing pretty well, as Ireland is now ninth in the EU in this respect. We have kept moving up the rankings. We are investing in research and development with a relevance to enterprise and innovation, so we are continuing to do well. Some of these indicators would include big issues such as staff ratios, but I am reasonably satisfied that our institutes of education are still scoring well on the items that matter to enterprise. We must continue in that respect.