Mr. Kenneth Fox:

On the technical side, I will just echo something Ms Cox said to give an example. I remember when the mobility allowance was in progress. There was a student in Dublin who was quite happy to use public transport to get to lectures. There were vagaries that might occur at times with being left behind at bus stops or not being able to get on certain buses and things like that. For examinations, however, this student would get Vantastic or the Lucan Disability Action Group, as it was at the time, to pick them up and take them from door to door. That kind of reliable door-to-door transport is what Ms Cox is speaking about. The mobility allowance was saved and was crucial to those kinds of door-to-door transports when a person had to be somewhere at a certain time. Individuals saved that money for those occasions.

To go through the grant values for the tax relief scheme, the grant level for a passenger is a fixed €15,000 or €16,000 now. The point I was making was that the cost for a person's adaptations, say, for a vehicle that has a lower floor and is wheelchair accessible with lowered floor accessibility, is probably €30,000. Tax relief is €15,000 but a person gets the same relief if he or she is putting in a swivel seat, which is probably less than €2,000 - maybe €1,500. There is a notion that there is not actually any graduation. There is a bit of graduation on the driver's side so, in fact, the driver gets €10,000 for his or her adaptations. If a person is in a wheelchair accessible vehicle in which he or she is driving from a wheelchair, he or she will get €15,000. The passenger has to keep the vehicle for two years, but the driver must keep it for three years. If that person has what are called extensive adaptations with specialised braking or specialised steering and wheelchair accessibility, there is a grant of €22,500 but the driver would have to keep that vehicle for five years. Again, that is a lot of graduation on the driver's side in terms of limits and the length of time a person has to keep the vehicle, but there are none on the passenger's side.

The whole scheme presupposes that a person will only qualify if there is an adaptation to be made to the vehicle. Therefore, the basis of the original scheme was compensation for adaptation. The use of the scheme has changed. In general, in terms of a wider view of what people need for transport and why people need transport, that is not the structure of the legislation for the scheme. There is, therefore, nothing for all those categories of people about whom Ms Cox spoke in her presentation.