Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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I thank our witnesses for being here. It is very thought provoking to see this experiment play out in our neighbouring jurisdiction because we have been looking at means testing here. I am not sure how well our witnesses know the Irish social protection system but it is very hybridised between universal payments, social assistance payments and social insurance payments. We have these small pots of means testing in different areas which are not all within the Department of Social Protection but are spread out across the governmental system. They are essentially bolt-ons to solve particular problems at particular times. A lot of them are historical, legacy bolt-ons. One of the infuriating things about it is that the Irish social protection system is actually quite good, despite the very hybrid and patch-and-mend approach over the years. Our market income inequality is quite high as measured on the GNI coefficient but when we apply social transfers, we actually do substantially better. We have a highly distributive model of social protection within the Irish context but of course, we are looking at this in terms of whether we can provide efficiencies in the context of bureaucracy and all of these different pots of means testing or whether we can just get better outcomes for people. One of the difficulties, as Dr. Brewer said, is that to try to stop an entire social protection system so that we can do a complete overhaul is not really practical. We cannot bring the car to the garage but have to try to fix it while driving on the motorway which is why we have this feature of bolt-ons across our system. It is also why we are examining this idea of means testing.

Professor Millar talked about the why. Why is that we would do means testing? We could proceed from the point of view that we do not want to inadvertently pay a poor person slightly more money and make them slightly less poor, which is certainly not the approach or philosophical underpinning that I would bring to the argument. What we are trying to do with means testing is to limit opportunity costs and to make sure that our spending as a State reaches those who need it most. Means testing is a way of targeting that spend.

My questions are general. It was interesting to hear the discussion about the philosophical underpinnings of universal credit in the UK context. To my ears, it sounds very conservative with both a big and a small C, in that there is a particular approach to or philosophy about people who are either in poverty or out of work. I might be applying a prejudice there and am very open to correction on that. Maybe that is not the case at all. Some of the things we would like to see resulting from changes to our social protection system are increased progressivity, a decrease in the number of people in consistent poverty, in particular, and labour force activation or at least that the social protection system and its construction is no impediment to people entering work and that there are no cliff edges whereby people are disincentivised from participating in work.

My questions relate to a very general analysis of how the universal credit system has worked out in the UK. Has it been progressive? Has it been effective in terms of tackling poverty? I refer here to consistent and persistent poverty. Has it been effective in terms of labour force activation in a positive way, such that it is enabling people to participate in work rather than precluding them because of the nature of the social protection system?