Mr. R?n?n Hession:

The final question in the straw man on pay-related benefit, towards the back of it, gives the skeleton as to what a working-age payment might look like. Essentially, it is based on the model for the working family payment. The working family payment works in such a way that it does not involve all the cliff edges such as the number of days worked, disregard thresholds or secondary benefits. To make the sums easy, let us say the threshold for a couple with one child is €500 and they earn €400 from work. They get 60% of the difference. That is not what the actual thresholds are; my spontaneous sums are a bit rusty and I am just trying to make this easy to understand. The working family payment is missing two categories: childless couples and single people. The working-age payment would include them in a working family payment-type model and use that to replace jobseeker's allowance, instead of having it means-tested, whereby there is the four-in-seven-days rule, disregards and all sorts of other restrictions. For example, let us say you are an autistic person and your working pattern is two and a half hours a day.

At the moment you get nothing because you are employed every day. Under a working-age payment model there would be a threshold that applies to you and you would get some of the difference between what you actually earn and that threshold. That means you can work every day or just one day. It is just down to the money; it is not down to the hours or the days. The idea is to have more flexibility and to let people blend the income support they need with their working patterns. That is the idea. It is difficult to do in practice. However, because we are having the conversation on pay-related benefit, and this is an alternative answer for people who do not fit into that, we want at least to sketch out what we are thinking. In regard to the timescale, it will be complex to do. At this stage we have no idea of the costing because it will depend on what the thresholds are. However, in terms of the production line, it comes after the pay-related benefit. I would say it is the next phase.