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

I thank the Chair and Deputy Brady. I am grateful for their support and comments on the Christmas bonus. From dealing with people whose only source of income is the weekly payment they get from the Department of Social Protection, we all know how worried they were made feel today. I would say there is not a Deputy or Senator in these Houses who did not get countless calls, emails and text messages arising from this morning's inaccurate leak. I have been called choice names today as people reacted. I am big enough and ugly enough to look after my own reputation - that is not at issue - but it was extremely mean to needlessly worry old people and those with disabilities to get a cheap headline.

Deputy Brady is looking for some clarity on the issue. The Christmas bonus is never included in the budget, so when I sit down with the Minister for Finance, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, next week we will not have a line in the budget for next year's Christmas bonus. That is for two reasons. Roughly half of the funding for the payment comes from the Social Insurance Fund, to which people contribute annually and which is, thankfully, in surplus at the moment. We will get into difficulty in this regard in the coming years when the fund will no longer be in surplus. However, we will make plans to make sure that we have enough money in the future. The other half of the funding comes from savings and those savings need to be found. One would want to be incredibly thick or entirely desperate, as the then Government was when it had no choice in the matter, to interfere with a payment on which hundreds of thousands of people rely. The Christmas bonus will never appear in a Budget Statement. It always comes from the Social Insurance Fund and other savings we make over the year.

The Deputy is correct about lone parents and the NGOs that represent them. The proposal that was made to me last year was to acknowledge and recognise that children over 12 eat more and cost more than children under 12 do. That point has also been made very clearly this year. What has also been made very clear to me this year is that the answer is not always to give extra money. The answer to addressing the very slow decrease in the number of children who are living in consistent poverty must also include services. It cannot just be about one Department giving extra money to families, even if that money is desperately needed. It has to be about education, housing, healthcare and justice issues, and we must all collectively work together to deliver on that agenda. The amount of money my Department would need to address consistent child poverty on its own would amount to billions of euro. The response has to involve more than raising the qualified child increase, QCI. It requires the delivery of a whole-of-Government approach.

I do not agree with Deputy Brady's proposal on the children's allowance. This is a universal payment and for all of the good that brings, it will remain a universal payment. In terms of the people who have been impacted by the increase in the age of children in secondary schools, any change to child benefit would result in an increased payment to everybody, meaning we would end up giving money to families who do not necessarily need it. As we discussed, we would have to increase taxes to increase the €800 million that is available this year. I am not sure we should increase taxes without specifically targeting the most vulnerable in the services or the social transfers we issue. On that basis, I do not favour change to the universality of child benefit. If we were to do as Deputy Brady suggested, we would not target the most vulnerable in society. That is not to say I am unaware of vulnerable families but we have other schemes and supports in place to help them if an 18 year old child is still in full-time education.

Deputy Brady is aware of my views on child maintenance. I will continue to have conversations on this issue with the Department of Justice and Equality. I have told the Department that we will support initiatives it leads on in any way we can. However, this is an issue on which my Department cannot lead. I can only be responsible for the actions my Department takes in dealing with lone parents and the pursuit of maintenance. The Deputy is aware that I made changes earlier this year when I was somewhat horrified to find out that we were forcing women to chase errant, abusive partners. That practice has ceased. I am also in the process of making considerable changes to the remainder of the liable relatives section in the Department. I will probably make an announcement later this year in that regard.

On whether I stand over the differential in payment to those aged under 26 and those aged over 26, I do. I do not see it as discriminatory. As I said on previous occasions at this committee, there are other options for young adults aged under 26. We announced the latest option this week and I am grateful that Deputy Brady gave it a cautious welcome. I look forward to seeing the pilot project bear fruit between now and Christmas so that we can allocate more money to it next year. I know we will soon face a scenario, hopefully by the end of this year, when the unemployment figure will fall below 200,000. We are all aware that there is a transient group of 100,000 people, give or take a small number, who are between jobs either for weeks or months. They are not people who are struggling to find employment.

That leaves us with a sizeable number of people who face real barriers to finding employment. Given that we are having job fair after job fair and that employers are telling us they cannot find people to employ, we have to address the real supports that are required to help those 80,000 plus people achieve employment either on a part-time or a full-time basis. The youth employment support scheme, YESS, programme for under 25s is going to make a significant difference. I will be back to update the committee on that. The pilot project is only for three months and I hope we will be back with tangible positive results to be able to extend it to a nationwide roll-out.

The reason community employment, CE, numbers are down is that the unemployment numbers are down. If there are more people working, there will be fewer people to do employment activation work. With the height of respect, I know the Deputy desperately feels it is JobPath and other people are telling him that. Because the Deputy so often mentioned that people were being stopped from doing CE when they were on the JobPath programme, I made the changes in good faith to allow people to do CE, Tús and JobPath. However, doing so did not change the applications for the jobs that are available through community employment programmes one jot. I know the Deputy genuinely believes there was a cohort of people on JobPath who desperately wanted to be able to avail of CE schemes. There are some people who have approached me in the past couple of months who are thrilled to have been able to do so, but the numbers are tiny. That tells me JobPath is not the reason people are not doing CE schemes or taking up employment that is available currently as the economy is recovering and employment is being provided, mostly by small to medium-sized businesses. It tells me there are other issues, be they social issues, disadvantage issues or training issues. There are myriad other issues that are stopping people availing of either the training employment schemes or the actual employment that is available. Collectively, we can get to the bottom of it and provide the supports and services to ensure that those 80,000 long-term unemployed are given the supports by the State to make sure that number comes drastically down. As the overall numbers come down, that group of problems will become more prevalent.

The final question was about Turas Nua and Seetec. The fee payments were €1.2 million in 2015, €25.2 million in 2016, €54 million in 2017 and €38.9 million up to the end of June in 2018. The actual expenditure of €38.9 million was an estimate of €25 million with a variance of €13.9 million. I do not think it is intended to publish the individual payments to each of the companies because they are commercially sensitive. In addition, the publication of these payments would place the State at a disadvantage in terms of our current contracts and the future placement of these or other, new alternatives.