Dr. Fiona Dukelow:

I will pick up on some of the initial questions the Deputy asked and the comments he made on the graphs. There is a very clear explanation for some of them and it is not so clear for others. The graph on pensions is very clearly a result of policy changes. Where we are seeing more people qualify for the contributory State pension, that means fewer people are on the non-contributory pension. That is very clearly a result of policy.

The working age income trends are very much cyclical. I just looked at the last ten years and we are seeing a cycle in the economy unfolding at the same time. The 2013 figure, for example, would have been at a time when there was still high unemployment after the financial crisis. At that point, the figure was 80% or 81%, so it has since fallen, which reflects the return to full employment. It is also possibly reflecting to a degree changes to entitlement to jobseeker's benefit, which has been curtailed on a time basis. It is now only possible to claim jobseeker's benefit for six or nine months, whereas previously it would have been 12 or 15 months. There is that aspect also, which is primarily cyclical.

The illness disability and caring figure is probably the interesting one because it has gone up by about 11% in ten years. This is quite a rise over a short period of time. That is not cyclical and is not necessarily related to policy. There are probably multiple reasons, many of which we do not necessarily understand. It is a challenge then to determine how to deal with that when the majority of the payments are means-tested payments. We do not have many categories of social insurance for working-age people who are long-term ill, disabled or caring. That trend is a challenge.

The one-parent and working family payment certainly is a cliff edge, as was mentioned, for people who are finishing their entitlement to the one-parent family payment. The Deputy also mentioned the cliff edge when the child reaches the age of 14. That is quite significant because the parent moves from an income disregard of €165 a week and drops down to the €60 per week on jobseeker's allowance if they still need to claim a payment. That is quite a drop in income if a person on jobseeker's transitional payment is working. Some people have made the argument that the payment should be extended until a claimant's youngest child reaches the end of second level education. Again, for the people we spoke to, their rationale is primarily a parenting rationale and they said a lot of parenting goes on when the child is aged between 14 and 18 years. That is a time when children need a lot of parenting.

Other people argued that it gave them more time. A lot of people we talked to were very interested in upskilling, training and going up the ladder with education, especially if they could do that part time, which they will be able to do from next September with the changes to the SUSI grants. It gives them more time to combine that kind of upskilling or retraining with looking after their children while they are still quite young. The child's age qualification cut-off is possibly another cliff edge that could be looked.

On the different types of means tests and marginal differences, they can be a headache for the claimant and they are often a headache for the administrator as well as for deciding officers.

Their duty is to work out the best payment every time for an applicant. If you can potentially claim a payment either on an assistance or insurance basis, then the deciding officer will have to run the figures through both those scenarios, which takes up a lot of their time too. It builds in more extra complexity, more costs and more administrative burden on the Department side of things as much as it does on the claimant's side. It means a lot of navigating must be done and not only by claimants.