Mr. R?n?n Hession:

What we are seeing in the overall figure is that 75% of cases are covered entirely by the housing disregard and the remaining 25% or 24% get the full benefit of the disregard. Child maintenance will no longer be part of the picture in the future so that disregard now applies only to the residual portion.

We have still some work to do on this but in the case of most lone parent cases, if there is a court order, that is all very clear. In a lot a lone parent cases where there is not an ongoing relationship between two people, there is no basis for the payment of spousal maintenance. In most case, child maintenance is all that is in play. When we talk about these disregards into the future, the amount of money they apply to will no longer include child maintenance. It will just be the spousal bit. While I take the Deputy's point that the figure has not moved, in 75% of cases it does its job in covering off the housing cost.

We completely agree with the Deputy that this is a vulnerable cohort with a high poverty rate, one that is much higher than in the general population. Certainly from our point of view, we hope that decoupling child maintenance from the social welfare system means it can be a separate untouched income source for the household that will not have a knock-on effect on its payments. We hope we are in the business of helping people who are in a hole to get out of it. In all our schemes there is a nexus where a person's income gets to a point where he or she may need less support from the social welfare system or he or she is in employment. That is always the tricky bit. As the Deputy will know from experience, we know from all our schemes that when people have other sources of income, whether it is from employment or elsewhere, and a degree of financial independence, the design choice will be a matter of how the social welfare system handles somebody leaving a payment and being financially independent.

That is a really tricky part of the process.