Ms Naomi Feely:

I thank members of the committee for their comprehensive comments and questions. I hope to capture them all but if I do not then I ask members to remind me at the end.

I will first deal with fuel allowances. I note that Deputies O'Dea and Brady and Senator Butler have said it is great idea to pay the fuel allowance in two lump sums. We are glad to hear that the Department also thinks the suggestion is good. We have discussed it at the pre-budget forum and the Minister seems to think it is a good idea. Therefore, we need to implement the idea. We are not sure how much the scheme costs. It seems the payment will remain the same but the way it is delivered will change so one thinks minimal costs would be involved in implementing a system of two lump sums. Obviously we do not know the Department's internal administrative arrangements. I do not want to say the process will be cost neutral because I am sure it will cost a significant amount to set it up. Time and again we have heard people say two lump sum payments is a good idea so let us make it a priority.

In terms of fuel allowance, Deputy O'Dea asked how many people rely solely on the pension.

It is difficult to disaggregate the exact figure because such pensioners could have a small private pension for which they are getting quite a nominal amount. We have a figure of 53,831 for those in receipt of the fuel allowance who are in receipt of the State pension non-contributory. That is from the departmental statistics. Each year the Department publishes its statistics. The latest ones available are those for 2014. One is talking about 53,831 out of a total of 95,000 recipients. Of those on the State pension contributory, 69,000 are in receipt of the fuel allowance out of a total of 346,000. All of those statistics are available in the Department's published statistics.

Ms Fahey probably has a number of points to make on the issue of fuel poverty and energy poverty because the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has been to the forefront on this issue. We have a strategy. The Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment has published a strategy to address this issue, a critical component of which is a whole-of-government approach. It is not only about tinkering around with the fuel allowance. An innovative pilot programme in the strategy that I mentioned in my opening comments looks at a deep retrofitting of homes. They have piloted this in parts of Dublin - I just cannot think of the postcode areas off the top of my head. Its critical aim is to target those who already have respiratory conditions and they are trying to pitch it as being an investment in the houses of those who spend more time trying to access health services in an effort to make a saving across Departments. That is the approach with which we need to be coming at this. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul has a good approach in terms of fuel stamps, about which I am sure Ms Fahey can give more detail.

The other critical issue, in terms of addressing energy poverty, is trying to ensure that people are enabled to go online if they wish to so do and the Department of Communications, Climate Change and Environment supports this through a grant called BenefIT. We have called for a continued increase in that funding and putting it on a multi-annual basis. More than half of those over the age of 65 have never gone online. Younger people would immediately go online to see what are the most cost-effective measures or fill out the switching forms but for older people, there is a greater challenge in this regard. However, the number of those over the age 75 who have gone online is quite negligible, at approximately 3%. There is a significant challenge but we need to be making those switching options more accessible to people.

The second contribution was from Deputy Brady. One of the issues he raised - I probably covered the fuel allowance issues - is the transition pension and this is an important point. One of the issues is we still have not abolished mandatory retirement rates and if one is in the public service or perhaps under other contracts, one must retire upon reaching the age of 65. Last year we welcomed the opportunity to present on this issue at the Department of Justice and Equality. Former Deputy Anne Ferris brought forward a good Bill on this and there was almost cross-party support to abolish mandatory retirement. Obviously, with the dissolution of the Dáil, that has not gone forward and I am not really sure where it is in the system. However, the issue is that there has been considerable support for it. One gets somebody who, maybe at the age of 65, is forced to retire but cannot access the State pension and the person finds him or herself accessing jobseeker's benefit or allowance. While the Department has been quite relaxed in terms of the activation measures around that, such persons find themselves, maybe for the first time in their lives, in a dole office which can be unsettling when they are coming to a point in their life where they want to retire. We have done some work on that and we can certainly provide the committee with our policy position on it. We have a document that we can submit.

The other issue Deputy Brady, and Senator Butler, brought up was the bereavement grant. We have called for its reinstatement at a cost of €20 million. In terms of the community welfare officer, CWO, it is not something about which I would have direct contact with a CWO but there is a variance across the country. I suppose it is dependent on the CWO in one's area.

With regard to Senator Ardagh's comments on Age Action Ireland, we do not provide individual support to older people in the same way the Society of St. Vincent de Paul does. We do not give people monetary payments, but we have a service called care and repair for older people who would be less likely to be able to change a light bulb or something like that. We provide a free service involving small do-it-yourself jobs such as cutting their grass, putting up Christmas decorations and other jobs that become increasingly difficult while we age. We have figures on that and also on the number of calls to our information line looking for information.

Deputy Collins raised the eligibility criteria for the one-parent family payment. That is linked to Senator Higgins' point on the gender pension gap, which is an issue I had wanted to discuss. It concerns the research we have conducted on which Deputy Curranasked us to respond. In terms of what we have done, in 2012 the eligibility criteria for the pension was changed in that where originally we had four bands, that increased to six bands. Getting the top rate of payment, therefore, becomes increasingly difficult. The first band remained unchanged but the second band was divided into three. With regard to bands 5 and 6, the weekly amount is less.

What is interesting about that and how it relates to the point Senator Higgins made on the gender differences in that we see a disproportionate impact on older people, in the statistical information I mentioned when addressing Deputy O'Dea there are global figures on the number of pensions, but as we drill down into access to pensions, we can see the gender dimensions. For example, there is a fairly even gender break, at 50:50, with regard to overall pensions for people over the age of 65. With regard to the contributory pension, however, two thirds are male and one third is female. When we look at the non-contributory pension, two thirds are female and one third are male. We can see that women are less likely to be recipients of the contributory pension to which one contributes throughout one's life. When we drill down further, however, and examined the changes, and who has been in receipt of the top bands, we see that in the top band of payment where people get €233 per week, 73% are male and 27% are women. If we drill down further we see that in the second one, 78% are male and 22% are women, but immediately we see a reversal. For band 3, which is 30 to 39 annual contributions, we see that 43% are men and 57% are women. Women are predominantly in the lower bands of the pension rate but the major issue we have with the 2012 changes is that they substantially reduced the weekly rate to which they are entitled.

In our research we undertook to contact the Department to get some statistics from it. We also tried to capture the lived experience of women and men who are impacted by this change and we found that the reduction they would face during their lifetime could be up to €20,000. We reckon that approximately 36,000 have been impacted by this change, 38% of whom are men and 62% of whom are women.

We are at the final stage of drafting this report. It has gone to two external reviewers. We were hoping it would be available in the coming weeks. We are happy to provide the committee with a copy of the report. We would also be happy to attend the committee to discuss it with the members.

The other issue that was raised was the living alone allowance. A critical point about that is that it is negatively impacting on women. Women are more likely to live alone. We can see in the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice research that women on a non-contributory pension who are living alone will face a €9 weekly deficit. Those on the contributory pension have a surplus of less than €1. However, to go back to my previous point, that is assuming they are on the top rate of the contributory pension but as we can see, the way things are falling out, women are less likely to be on that. How do we address that issue? I believe we need to take a life course approach to addressing that. It is about addressing the pension issue, but it is also about addressing the issue of care across the life cycle. In terms of those impacted by the 2012 changes, we are talking about people who were born between 1946 and 1950.

They would have got married in the early 1970s and would have been subject to the legal obligation to retire upon marriage, as per the marriage bar, if they were working in the public sector or there would have been cultural expectations that they would stay at home. Therefore, they would have exited the workplace. They may have worked before they got married and when their children grew up they may have returned to work but, invariably, they returned to work prior to 1996 when the credits under the homemaker's scheme were introduced. Those women are not able to take up credits under that scheme as a means to reach the top contributions. This is an issue we have increasingly become aware of through our members and we will publish our research on this in the next month or two.

Senator Higgins raised the issues of home care and the national positive ageing strategy, and I will respond to both of those together. While we have the national positive ageing strategy, we do not have an implementation plan for it. I am aware that the Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, held a meeting of older people's organisations, at which Age Action was represented by our chief executive office, CEO, to discuss where we should we go in terms of taking action on it. There is an implementation deficit here, although when I attend other events across the community and voluntary sector I find that it is not unique to the national positive ageing strategy. There is an implementation deficit in terms of policy across Government.

There is a commitment in the national positive ageing strategy to enable people to age in place. That is not something new. It has been enshrined in policy since the late 1960s. We have put forward that people should be enabled to age at home. If we consider the funding of the nursing homes support scheme, which puts access to long-term and residential care on a statutory footing, for every €1 that we pay on home care, we invest €276 in residential care. I have a copy of the research on this area that we published and I would be happy to forward it to the committee. Earlier this year we found that 50% of people who were residing in nursing homes did not need to be there. We need adopt a value for money approach in this respect. Under a programme in the United Kingdom, they invested in giving people low to medium supports within the home and this resulted in savings in hospital bed hours and in the number of times people accessed accident and emergency departments. That is contained in our submission to the Department of Health, which I can forward to the committee.

To return to the pensions issue, we need to consider proofing budgets, whether it be equality proofing or examining matters in a more holistic and consistent way. Decisions are made that seem to have the impact of making departmental savings but we need to examine their impact on specific groups. The 2012 changes in eligibility criteria for pensions have had a disproportionate impact on women. We now have a commitment in the programme for Government to examine the issue of equality and gender proofing, and we need to set up that infrastructure to ensure that when we have these discussions, decisions are made in the round and on the basis of having the least adverse impact on vulnerable groups. I hope I have answered all the questions that were put to me.