Mr. John Dunne:

We appreciate the opportunity to address the committee. I will take a hop, skip and jump through the committee's agenda by raising issues of concern to us and which we consider are part of the committee's brief. I will begin by dealing with the issue of income supports for family carers. I acknowledge the significant achievements made in this regard in recent years. I am sure people tend to come before this committee to give out about things but two particularly significant developments from our point of view are the reduction in the average processing time for carer's allowance to eight weeks - we would like it to be shorter but it is none the less a massive improvement - and the revised application, review and feedback process for the domiciliary care allowance.

I draw the committee's attention to a conclusion in 2012 by the Joint Committee on Jobs, Social Protection and Education that carers are in a unique category. In the context of the proposed single payment to people of working age, the only group of welfare recipients to be excluded from that payment were carers. It is worth reflecting on this when designing future income support strategies. The concept of a core social welfare payment has become significant in recent years in the context of the programme for Government, but there is studied ambiguity regarding whether the half-rate carer's allowance is designated a core social welfare payment. We would like clarification that it is such a payment.

From a carer's point of view, one of the most unfortunate things that happened in recent years was budget 2015 and the cut to the respite care grant. We would like that to be restored. Currently the grant is paid if the recipient is caring on a certain date in June. A carer would receive nothing if he or she cared for the entire year and ceased caring because the care recipient died or went into long-term care on the day before the grant was due. This seems an arbitrary way of providing financial support. Even if the payment were made twice a year based on a half year's accrual, it might be an improvement. During the question and answer session, I will address the question of a contributory State pension for long-term family carers, if members wish.

As I noted earlier, we regard the review of the domiciliary care allowance as a positive initiative. Many of the improvements made to the application process for that allowance could be extended to carer's allowance and carer's benefit. The review group has also made proposals on the transition period when an individual reaches the end of his or her caring duties. Due to circumstances outside the carer's control, such as due to the death of the person being cared for, he or she is no longer a carer. A carer will get six weeks if the care recipient dies but if he or she is taken into hospital, the carer will in principle lose the carer's benefit on the following day. That is a drastic adjustment and some sort of transition arrangement would be a good idea.

We have no argument with the control and fraud initiative but we draw to the committee's attention the Comptroller and Auditor General's conclusion that error was a bigger cause than fraud when it came to issues of control in income supports. The biggest issue is that we still do not have automatic notification from the Department of Social Protection to the Revenue Commissioners when somebody is awarded the carer's allowance. The carer is made responsible for the fact that two agents of the State cannot communicate with each other. That is relatively easy to fix and it deserves to be addressed.

I accept this is controversial but we support the proposal by the Minister for Social Protection to increase the upper age of entitlement to domiciliary care allowance to 18 years. The proposal has implications for eligibility to disability allowance and benefit.

I want to suggest a useful innovation for the longer term. Currently medical assessors are employed in the Departments of Social Protection and Education and Skills, and in the health system, all of whom plead they do not have the resources to do the job as they would wish. We cannot understand why consideration is not given to merging the three systems to provide a single medical assessment unit. Three times as many resources would be available to carry out a single review of everybody instead of three reviews of some individuals and no review of others.

I draw the committee's attention to a crossover between health and social protection. We believe there is a widespread policy whereby the HSE withdraws supports from families, in some cases all supports and in others anything over five hours per week, where they are receiving the carer's allowance. We believe that is frustrating the statutory basis for the carer's allowance as an income support, aside from being highly undesirable in terms of health and social policy.

In regard to special education and family carers, cutbacks to supports for children with disabilities who attend mainstream schools are forcing parents to reappraise their circumstances. Policy in this area aims to encourage people to live as normal an existence as possible. If by taking the constructive and positive route one is effectively excluded from supports and services, why would one take that route? While €4 million in additional resources has been allocated this year to help people who are coming out of school to transition into an alternative environment in the HSE, parents often spend the summer, or indeed the following year, worrying about whether a place will be made available. We suggest, as a simple solution that would not cost too much, guaranteeing a student the right to repeat in the education system if he or she does not get a place. That is far from ideal but at least it offers a measure of security or safety blanket. It is possibly an inexpensive but worthwhile innovation.

We suggest there needs to be more focus in the education system on young family carers.

The last area is labour market training and activation. We welcome the moves to reinvent or reshape community employment into a traineeship approach and to focus on health care as one part of the pilot phase. We think that is very worthwhile. We would like to lend our voice to the number of calls that long-term unemployment start at six months rather than 12 months. I do not know if there are EU problems with that but certainly from a human point of view, 12 months is a long time to have to wait to access some of these things. By the time it comes around, it may be too late for some.

We support the vision and aspirations behind Intreo, SOLAS and QQI, but we have encountered a number of practical difficulties in working through some of the schemes they offer. The quality of referrals through Intreo has been extremely poor. What is more, the new rules are obstructing some older ways of recruiting which had been effective. I do not think that will be news to the Department but we had to put it on the record and say we hope there will be more on it. I noticed Deputy Ó Caoláin asked a question about the review of the last MOMENTUM programme and he was told there was a report in hand with SOLAS on the recruitment phase but it has not yet been published, so that needs to be kept under review.

There have been significant failures of co-ordination between the new agencies, in particular in the inaugural MOMENTUM programme. We support the move to have the people delivering these services for a fee to be paid by results, but if the State system is not delivering on its part of the equation, what one is doing is shifting the risk to the private or the voluntary sector, although one is tipping the dice against the voluntary or private sector and when it does not work, one says that is tough and that it did not do its job. This was a case where the State was clearly falling down on its end of the deal.

We are concerned about inconsistencies in entitlements for participants. This is very demotivating if one is trying to get somebody to participate in a programme and he or she knows that if they do a different programme, he or she will get an extra benefit. There is no reason for different standards.

We would like to flag a constant problem. There is an inherent conflict of interest where State agencies provide some services directly while, at the same time, commission the same services from third parties. It is generally not a good model from which to operate.