Mr. John McKeon:

I will make one or two general points and Mr. Egan then will answer all the specific questions on the one-parent family payment. A number of people made reference to concurrent payment and community employment and took the fact that the number of people on community employment and lone parent's allowance has fallen as evidence of deactivation, rather than activation. I make this point from an activation perspective but it is important not to confuse a place on a scheme with being activated. Most members of the joint committee will be aware of the very strong criticisms that have been made in the past of community employment as an activation programme. These included some reports from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, which questioned fundamentally the relevance of community employment, as well as the very low progression rates out of that scheme, particularly among lone parents, where people effectively used the concurrent payment and stayed on it for a very long time. They were not progressing into employment but were getting a top-up payment by doing something in the community employment sector. The general point I wished to make is that is not the same as activation.

The second general point I wish to make is with regard to the references to deprivation and the survey on income and living conditions, SILC. It is not necessarily a subject to go into at this committee meeting but this might be possible at a subsequent meeting. There are some headline numbers contained within the survey that everybody will grab and it is understandable why people will do so. It is an extremely complicated study and the actual real story is not necessarily the story that is portrayed in the headline numbers. At some stage, it probably is worth having a committee meeting on the survey and I am sure the Department would be happy to appear before the committee and give its views on it. As I mentioned, to get into it now would take hours but members should be aware that some of the headline numbers are not necessarily reflective of all the numbers it contains.