Mr. Robin Hanan:

There are different levels of poverty proofing. When the poverty proofing system was introduced first in the national anti-poverty strategy in 1997, there was originally very tight co-ordination by the Department of the Taoiseach to ensure all Government memoranda and most of the main items in the budget, through what was then a single Department of Finance, included statements on their impact. The level of assessment depended on the nature of the proposal. Therefore, a proposal for the introduction of a new scheme included a certain amount of subjective data and a certain amount of economic modelling. At the moment, the Department of Social Protection is rolling out a new supplementary social impact assessment, using the SWITCH model, and some of that information will be usedpost hocto look at the impact of tax and welfare decisions in the round in the budget. I am sure the committee is aware of this as the Department will have made presentations to it about the impact.
There are a number of problems with this, however. First, the new model only looks at the overall impact of the entire budget and does not look at the contribution of different elements. Second, where it identifies groups that are particularly disadvantaged, there is no feedback or no mention in the next budget of what compensatory measures will be taken to take that into account. Last year and the year before, for example, as one would expect, young unemployed people and lone parents were identified in this regard.
The model that was originally developed in Ireland in the 1990s has been held up as a model across Europe, and effective poverty proofing can include its combination of the objective and the subjective. However, the objective data is relatively easily available now through mechanisms such as the SWITCH model, economic modelling and the assessment of taxation. We are told some of this is already happening in terms of dialogue between different Departments, but none of this is part of the public or political debate about the introduction of new measures, changes to measures and so on. While we would not argue that a Minister for Finance should be required by law simply not to introduce a measure which might have an impact on poverty, we would say that this information should be out there very clearly as part of the public debate around the budget in order that compensatory measures can be taken.
The way the scheme was originally designed was to identify the impact, positive or negative, of particular measures on people experiencing poverty. With a change in social welfare entitlement, it is relatively easy to assess in advance in the broad sense what the impact of that is likely to be and also to look at compensatory measures. If there are environmental cases for introducing a particular type of utilities charge, we need to look at what are the compensating measures in the tax or welfare systems to ensure it does not have an impact on poverty. To take just one example, we are talking about information but we are also talking about using that information as part of the public debate. As I said, in the past we have had quite a strong data collection system around poverty proofing and the national anti-poverty strategy, but none of that came out in the political debate, in the public debate or in practical policy-making. It became a box-ticking exercise or simply a matter of monitoring changes when it was already too late.