Mr. R?n?n Hession:

The deciding officer has to make an interpretation of the law. We try to do it taking account of where the person is at. If a person has complex needs and for whatever reason does not meet the terms of an illness scheme or a disability scheme, for example, some people are on the supplementary welfare allowance as a result of their being sick and not entitled to benefits. They do not meet the qualification criteria for illness benefit. They also do not meet the qualification for disability allowance, but they need support. The system has to work with where people are at; we cannot just apply hard lines and say that someone does not fit entirely into a particular box. What the tiered approach allows us to do is that when we are talking about employment support for people like that, as I said earlier, we have about 26,000 people who are on either disability payments or other employment supports and who are working and availing of those supports. Some of those supports are underused, such as the reasonable accommodation fund or even the wage subsidy scheme. We would like to do more in that space. We have had success in the Ability programme and also through community employment. Deputy Ó Cuív has a background in the supported employment space. There is scope rather than it being just a binary conversation around employment. There are other ways in which people can train or get experience but the conversation is not starting from a point of assessing baseline eligibility where the ultimate aim is to try to say that someone is just not doing enough as far as we are concerned and that their payment will be affected as a result. That is not the perspective and that has not been the experience with lone parents over the past ten years since that came in. It is a way of making sure there will be assigned people within our teams to work with people who have the capacity to work and who want to work. We are getting good responses.

We had an early engagement process that we rolled out to about 16,000 people between the ages of 18 and 25 who are on disability payments. About 10% want to take that further with us. They want to work with case officers on training, which is a very good result. We are learning as we go with that. Even with lone parents, we are ten years doing it and we are still trying things out. For people with disabilities, we will also have to pilot different approaches. We may have to collaborate with NGOs and other people who have experience in this area. The intention is to build that sort of model for people who might be considered hard to employ or unemployable - it is not a phrase I like to use - who do not meet the thresholds for current disability payments. We deal with those people early and we try to support them and take account of where they are at. They are not a cohort in respect of which people go in with very black and white tests for them. Sometimes it involves working across other State agencies as well. There could be issues with homelessness, addiction, etc.

I might just touch on some of the other questions but if I did not hit the mark on that one Deputy Ó Cuív might let me know. The Deputy makes a very good point. It is one I wrestle with in the context of what the higher tier is measuring. It is kind of using a proxy for things, which is that if we have a higher restriction a person is not definitely but is more likely to have a higher cost of disability and less likely to have capacity to work. Those things combined in policy terms make the case for a higher payment. I accept what the Deputy says, that there can be people who have a very high level of restriction but have a very high capacity to work or perhaps their cost of disability might be lower because their needs are met through other supports. The tiering has kind of used a proxy approach so the language in the Green Paper is really trying to say that when you look across the three tiers, our imperfect judgment is that the people in the top tier are going to have more difficulty supplementing their income from work.