Dr. Tricia Keilthy:

We fully agree with Deputy Ó Cuív's assessment on HAP. We routinely come across such situations where households are put under significant financial pressure to pay the top-up. I can think of one example where a lone parent was in minimum wage employment and was paying a direct top-up of €100 per week to her landlord. This causes awful difficulties for families. It puts them at risk of becoming homeless and it causes them to cut back on basics, such as food and utilities. That is the main reason people approach St. Vincent de Paul for help. We will again be emphasising the need for more social housing that is built or acquired by the local authorities or approved housing bodies in our submission to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. We also need to look at the HAP limits and on whether they are reflective of market rents. If not, we need to look at increasing those. At the same time we must be mindful of the need for rent certainty measures so that HAP is not inflating rents. We also need to consider expanding homeless HAP provision to all counties outside Dublin and Cork because we are seeing more families in smaller towns and other areas being impacted by the HAP top-up. It is causing difficulties across the country.

We have seen the impact of the closure of some local offices and how that has impacted the access that households have to exceptional needs payments or urgent needs payments when they need them at times of crisis. We particularly see the impact it has on people who had extra health and hospital charges prior to Covid, including travel. It is quite difficult to get access to that payment on short notice if one needs to ring up or if one cannot visit the local office. That causes difficulty for people. It is a form of support and we have a close relationship with community welfare officers on the ground in terms of links there but we come across gaps in what the maximum a community welfare officer will pay is and what the cost of white goods is, for example. Another big factor is the cost of funerals and bereavement. That can cause significant difficulties for households and a lot of the support provided by the community welfare offices, which is helpful, is not adequate in meeting the real cost of bereavement and funerals. Another issue we see routinely is that when someone moves into new housing, which is great, a lot of the local authority housing is not kitted out with flooring or white goods and this also causes great difficulties for low-income households. The community welfare office grant that is provided does not cover the full cost of that either so that is where St. Vincent de Paul often has to stand in and provide support.

The final point was on the cost of living and the minimum essential standard of living data. The gap between income from social welfare and the cost of a minimum essential standard of living for adults is €47 per week and for a lone parent the gap can be up to €80 per week. When we talk about our social welfare rates, therefore, we need to ensure they are evidence-based and we need to progressively realise that we need to be more ambitious in where we see our social welfare and social protection system providing support. As was mentioned, the Citizens' Assembly strongly supports a social protection system that provides a decent and adequate standard of living for people and prevents poverty. We outlined in our submission that we need an €8 increase in core social welfare rates but we also need proportionate increases for children over and under 12. We will provide costings in our full pre-budget submission later this year. We need to give a reminder of the cost of not investing in people's incomes. Research that we published shows that the State spends €4.5 billion every year through our public services dealing with the consequences of poverty on people's lives.