Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy has paraphrased my views on this issue. The reality is that the allowance has not been changed since 1996, which means that successive Ministers took a social policy view of this matter. It is not a matter of money but trying to develop a social policy that permits people to move in directions in which they would wish to move and not fall into any traps in the system that prevent them from doing that. The allowance is only €7.70 per week. The number of people in receipt of it is 151,000. We have endeavoured to substantially increase the pension over the years to ensure they get direct income, irrespective of their living arrangements. We also doubled the fuel allowance from €9 to €18 per week over a two year period. This year I virtually doubled the income threshold for eligibility for the fuel allowance from €51 to €100. I would argue that the money they would have got from increases in the living alone allowance has been made available to them directly through the pension and energy improvements.

The main downside to having a substantial allowance is that if older people needed to have somebody living with them they would face losing their living alone allowance because they would not be living alone. They may need that person living in the house. Successive Ministers have taken a social policy view and the Deputies will be aware — I am like a long-playing record on this issue — that for nearly three years I have been consistent in claiming that whatever changes we make must have a social policy objective to them. They must seek to help people move to better places, give them better choices, remove the sharp drops in the system and put in slopes rather than cliffs, so to speak. This is one of those areas where we might not necessarily be helping people were we to dramatically increase the allowance and continue to increase it, and where not to live alone becomes a financial disincentive. Those arguments were accepted by predecessors of mine. For better or worse I accepted them and I predict that future Ministers will take a social policy view of this issue and seek to ensure the income of the person, whether they live alone or with others, is decent and increasing and that is what we have tried to do with pensions.

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