Dr. Tom Boland:

It is a very specific question on tax credits as another way of dealing with the problem of low levels of spousal disregard. I am not an expert on tax credits, however, it is something that kicks in annually. There is a yearly tax liability and then a person can transfer his or her tax-free allowance to his or her spouse, which is something a person can nominate within the system. The system is reasonably flexible with Revenue's online services. The point is that this is annual whereas welfare - especially with jobseeker's allowance and where people are moving in and out of part-time work, which may be monthly or weekly - is something that is more flexible and is more of a moving target. This should be addressed by the tax credit system. That is my assessment of it.

The evidence I am drawing from there is from Dr. Rita Griffiths and others at the University of Bath who are looking into this. It is obviously not one of these areas in which we typically turn up and say more research is needed or something like that, which is typical in terms of the actual quantity of spousal disintegration amongst recipients of welfare as compared with the rest of the population. There is a certain pressure, when we talk to young people, who discuss openly whether they should say they are a couple or not, and this would be reflected in the qualitative interviewing all of us witnesses have done. They ask will they see the posters they have on the wall and they wonder whether they should take them down and that kind of thing. It certainly is taken into people's considerations. I do not think there is any way in which the welfare system should be considered as incentivising coupledom or something like that. It is not the sort of thing we should be involved in at all. What we should not be doing is disincentivising it. We certainly should not be creating means tests where the monetary impact of the means test might be limited, but the invasiveness of it is a sort of pressure we do not want to be bringing on people who are often in transitional and emergent arrangements and are under economic pressures. Those are the elements in the mix.

I do not need to add to the question of the black box of the Department of Social Protection. We would all certainly like to have much more free and open conversations with people within the Department. That is needed at the moment and is something we would like to have or rather, we would like if there was some way in which more data was available of a quantitative nature that perhaps was cleaned up to make it more anonymised. There is a certain amount available but not as much as we might like.