Mr. Rónán Hession:

In its analysis the ESRI looks at whether, without trying to be too clever, we can just push more resources into those. It does an analysis around what that translates to in terms of poverty impacts. The agency also looks similarly at putting it through the working family payment or some combination of those. You do get results. I know from some of the stakeholder groups we have spoken to, because we have asked everyone to consider this and give us their thoughts, that the experience of complex policy reform is that sometimes there is a preference for, or the stakeholder groups are more comfortable with, something that is familiar where they can have a good sense of what the result will be as opposed to something that is very new where there may be unexpected consequences. At this stage we are at the conceptual point of looking at all considerations. Definitely one viable option is to ask why be too clever and why not just target it if it is working. Having made a big leap this year in the budget, those rates have gone up a lot in both those payments. We now need to monitor what that translates to in terms of poverty.

One of the tricky issues can be due to the way the at risk of poverty measurement is calculated as a threshold that is a distance from median income, as Mr. Egan explained. Sometimes if a person is very far below that, an income can push them and really improve their situation but not get them over the threshold, so it does not show up and it does not register as an improvement. We have to look at what are the changes, particularly for low income households.