Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We have to be creative this year. I hope and expect that there will be more than €800 million to be spread around the 15 Departments.

The Deputy referred to lone parents in the context of the earnings disregard which he said was not related to the number of children. He is correct - it is not. It is related to the increase in the qualified child payment that we made last year. The payment is made per child and, as I have mentioned, the increase was the first in eight years and I hope it will not be the last. The income threshold for family income supplement payments for those who are working will vary considerably and significantly based on the number of children.

The Deputy is correct that a figure of €95.23 in maintenance payments is disregarded, but only 50% of the remainder of total income is assessed as means. The positin can be reviewed if maintenance is not being received.

I receive a great many requests to establish a statutory maintenance agency for all of the reasons described by the Deputy, particularly the difficulties women experience in having to traipse in and out of court. There is significant merit in the suggestion, but, unfortunately, it does not fall within my responsibility but within that of the Department for Justice and Equality.

When I have been asked parliamentary questions about this, which is frequently, I have explained, and I continue to explain, why it is not our responsibility and I forward those questions to the Minister of State, Deputy Stanton, who I think has responsibility for equality. If I could assist in any way in the development of a statutory agency, I would be very keen to do so.

The Deputy made a very good point about part-time courses. This is not something we have costed before, so I will certainly look into it in the coming weeks.

The processing time for carer's allowance applications is 18 weeks. For carer's benefit, it is 11 weeks. In fairness, this is because of the complexity of the scheme. Members have seen other schemes we have, and I refer in particular to domiciliary care allowance, in respect of which the processing time was also up at 18 weeks, which was very high and exceeds our Department's targets. That has now come right down to five weeks, and in the worst-case scenario to nine weeks, so we have seen huge improvements because we changed the application form. We made it much easier for people to provide us with the information, and medical assessments that arise from this are far speedier because the information is given. We are undergoing changes and will propose and discuss any changes to the carer's application form with interested bodies in the coming months to try to do something similar.

The Deputy is right, however, that it is unacceptable. It is something we continue to strive to reduce. The processing time for carer's benefit, at 11 weeks, is under target, and that for carer's allowance is over target at 18 weeks. We continue to monitor this and to try to work towards reducing it. In fairness, we had extra staff deployed from one section of our Department to work on carer's allowance to try to alleviate this, particularly over the summer when it happens a lot.

The cost of disability was raised with me last year. It was raised again at the pre-budget forum we had this year. I cannot consider it on my own because our Department offers income supports to people with disabilities and it is the State's responsibility to provide a much wider range of services and supports to people with a very wide range and complex set of needs. It is on this basis that I am in the process of consulting the other relevant Departments as to how best we ascertain the actual cost of disability. There have been commissions and initiatives in other countries from which we are learning, but in trying to address this issue we need to learn from other countries' mistakes and recognise that there is not a one size that fits all. It is not going to be a matter of a certain amount of money for everyone who is on a disability or an illness payment because of the complexity of people's struggles. We would like to do this comprehensively, and I would like to do it right. As I said, I am consulting other Departments to ensure we do it right.

The mobility grant is a Department of Health issue, but I will certainly pass on the Deputy's concerns to the Minister for Health.

I do not have an answer as to why fewer people have taken up the employment retention grant scheme. There certainly has not been a reduction in people with varying degrees of ability finding employment. We have two projects that we started last year that are providing huge supports for people who have disabilities but also have huge ability and want to contribute to the economy or indeed just want to ensure they are providing themselves with interaction and with life. We have the ability programme that was launched earlier this year, which had an uptake of probably twice what we could afford at the time. We will look to expand on that in the years to come. We also have the employability project, which was piloted jointly between us and the HSE last year and which we are now rolling out to every single county in the country. This is to support people who are suffering from varying degrees of mental ill health.

The projection of the partial capacity payment is also there, and the flexibilities that were introduced this year are to encourage people to take what they see as a risk of coming off an illness or long-term disability payment and going into the workplace. We have the fast-track return to the payment they were on if they do go into work and it does not work out. This is to support people to be secure in the knowledge that if they want to try going back to work for a couple of hours a week or a couple of weeks a month, should it not work out in the short term, the Department will always be there to support them in the long term. We will continue to work with employers to ensure that the ability programme and the employability programme are as successful as they have been initially.