Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 4:

In page 11, between lines 24 and 25, to insert the following:

“Report on establishing a social welfare adequacy commission

21. The Minister shall carry out a review on establishing a social welfare adequacy commission in order to ensure social welfare rates meet the Minimum Essential Standard of Living. (MESL) to study the effect that adequacy of social welfare rates could have on addressing poverty levels and that the report shall be presented to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Social Protection ahead of Budget 2025.”.

I am not the only person who made a point in this regard in this year's budget debate and in other years. There will always be politics in social protection payments but some of the type of politics that exists around payments in regard to the budget does not necessarily lend itself to good policy or even particularly fruitful public debate. It is about €10, €5 and all that kind of stuff. It can sometimes be divorced from the reality of what informs the cost of living for people, whether it is inflation, fuel prices or various issues like that. The last year and a half gave rise to particularly stark examples of that in regard to fuel and inflation.

It is our view that a model along the lines of the Low Pay Commission is the best method to try to inform the adequacy of social protection payments. A social welfare adequacy commission should be established that would be able to provide, on an annual basis, a benchmark, taking into account all the different inputs, which can vary at different stages. Inflation can be high or low at different stages. Food can form a higher or lower proportion of people's expenditure. I do not know if it will always be possible to provide a clear benchmark between payments and simple inflation as I think there are more complicated factors involved. The approach can be somewhat ad hocand arbitrary, although perhaps less so this year than in the past four or five years. In addition, the level of some payments has not kept pace with the costs people are experiencing.

The Vincentian Partnership has done excellent work on the minimum essential standard of living, MESL. That could be one of the inputs but it need not be the only input. For this reason, we propose to establish a social welfare adequacy commission to ensure payments are adequate and people are kept out of poverty and not put at risk of poverty.