Dr. Claire Keane:

We model them as they are in reality. Again, we can observe the people who get family income supplement or working family payment, and we can assign that to them.

The Deputy mentioned that lone parents have experienced a sharper loss in income. We do have to bear in mind, as I am sure she is fully aware, that there are always trade-offs. Yes, there has been a slightly sharper loss for lone parents in the last few budgets but the aim was to increase participation rates, particularly by female lone parents, and increase their employment. We are seeing one side where tax benefit policy may have reduced their income but we have to bear in mind that the aim was to increase employment rates. In the next year we would like to get our hands on administrative data on all lone parents in order to see whether the changes, which were fully rolled out by 2015, had a positive impact on the employment of lone parents.

It is important to realise that a lot of our gender budgeting work is not narrow and that we do not look at things in isolation. While the income of those groups may have been cut, we look at whether there was a positive impact on employment income, which is something we hope to look at this year also.