Mr. R?n?n Hession:

With regard to people who are farming and their having the ability, through their phone or otherwise, to still maintain contact, we are not supervising or scrutinising the detail of how people spend their time, as such. The payment is there for people who are not able to work because of their caring responsibilities and to provide an income support in the absence of that ability to work. Where a person is still able to work because of technology and their caring responsibilities do not prevent them from working, that is not really what the carer's allowance is there to do as an income support. That is not to undervalue or downplay their caring responsibilities play in any way, but to explain that the carer's allowance is not a payment for caring, as such. It is an income support that kicks in because people have a limited ability to take on full-time employment. The income support is to recognise that such are their caring responsibilities that they are not able to avail of full-time work. It slightly flips it a bit. Rather than saying that technology has enabled them to manage both and therefore, they have been able to do more.

Under most of our schemes, people in full-time education are not eligible for income-support help, apart from some exceptions, of which the PUP was one. We have had this discussion in our engagement with carers, through the carers forum, in terms of breaking down how people spend their time, travel to and from full-time education, study time and course work. In running schemes, we have to try to set what we believe are reasonable boundaries. We are always talking to carers about what is the lived reality. Where a person is engaged in and has a full-time commitment to education, our scheme would say that means the person is not full-time available for caring.

However, I accept the Chair's point about young carers. There is, in the discussion around carers, perhaps a belated recognition on our part about where young carers fit into that. We have run a programme through the Dormant Accounts Fund over the past couple of years to fund some projects to help young carers. We had to say to a group at a carers forum a couple of years ago that it was right, in that we tend to think of the carer being the same age or older than the person for whom he or she is caring. Sometimes, one is a bit out of touch and needs to hear that.

In terms of flexibility for carers, where the arrangements for the person for whom he or she are caring are such that the carer has some time in the day to themselves, the move to 18 and a half hours was influenced to a degree by the arguments made by people such as those. Some 18 and a half hours is a half-time pattern. If someone was to do mornings only in the Civil Service, he or she would work 18 and a half hours. It allows people that scope, where they have that time in which their caring responsibilities and the structure of their day have changed, as the person is in some other day arrangement such as employment, education or other activity. That was the thinking behind it. It is always a balance.

The move from 15 hours to 18.5 hours is the first time that was done in 15 years, so it is a case of "suck it and see".

The scheme fits into the wider architecture of the social welfare system. Above that, different thresholds kick in for other schemes and there is a bit of dissonance between the schemes, for example, the working family payment. We have to watch those. We are trying to make the wider social welfare system coherent. In recent years, we have tried to allow flexibilities through the means test, the change to 18.5 hours and the capital disregard. We have also funded a few training programmes the carers' organisations are operating and which are delivering very good results for carers who are ready to go back to work or have been caring for a long time and whose confidence or skills need a boost. It is not a "Yes" or "No" question or answer, if the Chairman knows what I mean, but something we try to keep under review in the context of the wider decisions we have to make about how schemes work.