Ms Roshin Sen:

I thank the Acting Chair and the Deputy. There are a good few questions there so I will work my way through them. In terms of the update on the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 and its progress on implementation, we publish a progress report annually. There are 66 unique targets within the roadmap under seven distinct strands. Looking at the end of 2022, 37 of the roadmap commitments were achieved fully or achieved with ongoing delivery. A further three were in progress, on schedule with ongoing delivery, 27 are in progress and work on the final two was to begin in early 2023. Also to note we are doing a mid-term review of the roadmap as well. We undertook a public consultation last year and did a review of the indicators and we are finalising and pulling that together now. That is examining the progress in the implementation and the appropriateness of the indicators and recognises the changed context since the roadmap was published in January 2020.

I absolutely take the Deputy's point in terms of the differing rates of poverty for different groups and there are a number of groups who have much higher rates of consistent poverty than others and that includes people with disabilities and lone parents. Within that, there are a number of different measures, both within the roadmap for social inclusion and pathways to work in order to reduce this. This works in a number of different ways. Part of it is income supports of course but there is also a need to improve services. For instance, one of the commitments within the roadmap for social inclusion was to commission a report into the cost of disability and looking at that, it can be seen there is a requirement for services as well as for income and that is being progressed through the national disability inclusion strategy steering group. What we can see also, when we look at the minimum essential standard of living, is that when improvements are made to services, then the amount of money a household needs then reduces so that has a real impact.

We are also conscious that employment is the best route out of poverty where it is appropriate and possible. Consequently, the Department is also undertaking a number of different measures to help improve employment outcomes.

We have made changes to the earnings disregards for people in receipt of disability allowance and the lone-parent payments. For people with disabilities we have rolled out early engagement on a voluntary basis with the public employment services for young recipients of disability allowance. That ensures that young people who would like to take up training or enter employment are aware that they can engage with the public employment services to seek help there. Work is ongoing on a number of different fronts to improve the poverty rates for those groups.

Deputy Kerrane also talked about social welfare rates and benchmarking.