Ms Carly Bailey:

One Family is grateful for the invitation to be here and we are pleased the topic of means testing is being considered by the committee. We are keen to bring the experience of one-parent families into this important discussion. We acknowledge the recent changes made around child maintenance and the liable relative provision, something One Family and other organisations have long campaigned for. It demonstrates that reform is possible if the political will is there. Lone parent households are consistently over-represented across all metrics: poverty, deprivation, housing insecurity and family homelessness, to name just a few. Lone parents and their children remain one of the most socially disadvantaged groups in Ireland today and have been for decades. Our staff regularly hear from parents who talk of feeling distressed and anxious. They tell us how fearful they are the system will let them down. Too often it does so when they need compassion, trust and support the most.

The social protection system has to be flexible and adaptable. Regarding means testing, we currently have an all-or-nothing situation. If a person earns €5 a week more than the threshold, he or she is entitled to zero. Tapered supports should be considered to prevent cliff edges and provide more certainty. The committee recently heard from Dr. Ray Griffin from SETU, who told them how he had measured the Department of Social Protection’s written guidelines and found that a person would need a university standard of education to understand it. That is a sad reflection of how complex and arbitrary the system is. Parents regularly tell us that even Intreo staff have provided incorrect or insufficient advice to service users. What about parents with low literacy levels, learning disabilities or language barriers? This only adds to feelings of shame, fear and anxiety.

We agree with other stakeholders, including the Citizens Information Board and the National Economic Social Council, that a centralised means testing system is required. Currently, if a person is applying for more than one means-tested payment, he or she must complete multiple applications. This creates undue stress on parents and is an inefficient use of State resources.

Across social assistance schemes, income disregards, income thresholds and the exclusion of particular social welfare payments can differ. We need to ensure any disregards on income thresholds for secondary benefits, including back to school clothing and footwear allowance, national childcare scheme and the medical card, are automatically raised in line with any core social welfare payment rises and the national minimum wage.

Even within schemes, how you earn your living can determine the payment you might receive and can impact on eligibility for secondary benefits, including the medical card. Cliff edges exist in the form of arbitrary age thresholds for the one-parent family payment and the jobseeker's transitional payment. Is it assumed that both the development of the child and the material circumstances of lone parents magically alter once a child moves from six to seven or 13 to 14 years of age? A review of income disregards is needed and the jobseeker's transitional payment should be extended until the youngest child finishes secondary level education.

In certain situations, parents need to apply for basic supplementary welfare allowance, SWA, while waiting for a decision or maybe an appeal for another payment. However, capital thresholds for SWA disregards are much lower than for other payments. Working family payment rules state that a person has to work 38 hours or more a fortnight or 19 hours a week. These hours apply whether the person is part of a two-parent household or is are parenting alone. This situation fails to consider the extra caring responsibilities that a lone parent has. A tapered or graduated version of working family payment should be considered for anyone working, for example, more than five hours a week, but at a minium the hourly threshold should be reduced to 15 hours a week for those working lone parents.

Some child maintenance payments are still assessed as means, irrespective of whether maintenance is paid on time, in full or if it is even paid at all. When assessing for HAP, RAS, the social leasing scheme or local authority differential rents, each council has its own scheme in place. Many still classify child maintenance as assessable income. Income percentages and rent caps can vary, which means that rents can be much higher for some lone parents.

Social housing eligibility is assessed on the basis of strict income thresholds that continue throughout the entirety of people's time on the social housing waiting list. Many feel they have no choice but to limit their earning potential as a result in order to remain eligible. If they are involved in irregular, casual or seasonal work, the Department extrapolates this across the rest of the year when calculating payments. Where employment has ended or hours have been reduced over the course of the year, parents still receive a payment based on an income they may no longer be receiving. We know these anomalies are a result of ad hocand incremental policy changes made over the years.

We believe that a full analysis of the entire Irish social welfare system, including in the context of issues relating to means testing, is necessary if we want to create a fair, equitable and efficient system that is dedicated to looking after us all from cradle to grave. It is our belief that the social protection system should act as a safety net that protects, reassures and helps to build people back up, not one that stigmatises parents, pushes them and their children further into poverty and traps them there for years to come. This, of course, will require significant investment by way of more targeted supports for lone parents and their children, including increases in benchmarked core social welfare rates.

I thank the committee members for their attention and time. We will be happy to answer any questions they may have.