Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this item of legislation and I hope my contribution will be considered constructive. Fine Gael has concerns about this legislation. It will have an impact on the lives of thousands of people. I have difficulty with many aspects of this Bill, many of which concern practicality rather than principle. I hope the Minister will take this point on board.

I believe in the principle of activation but I do not believe the Minister is approaching this from the correct angle. My difficulty is with the proposed sweeping changes that will have a profound effect on people's lives. They are being proposed without the backup of the necessary supports to implement the changes. These supports are vital if we are to lift people out of poverty and into meaningful employment. There is a key contradiction in the way the Minister is planning to implement some of the proposals. From my reading of the Bill, the two most significant proposed changes concern jobseeker's allowance, the supplementary welfare allowance and the one parent family payment.

Jobseekers are to be given the option of a course, a job or training. With good cause, they can refuse to participate and their payment will remain the same. The one parent family recipient, on the other hand, is cut off regardless of any factor once the youngest child reaches the age of 13. That is very different.

I strongly support the idea of activation, of assisting people to get back into work, education or training. That is the core solution to the problems we face. Fine Gael has stated consistently that the best way to address the enormous and spiralling social welfare bill is not to take money from the vulnerable but to get people back to work. The current Government has failed to tackle unemployment and set up a coherent job strategy. Instead, we will see the more vulnerable suffer further.

I welcome this and yet I question it. I welcome the Minister's promise to introduce an amendment to deal with the huge backlogs in the social welfare appeals office. However, there are 439,000 people unemployed and I have a genuine difficulty with the Minister bringing in retired people to do that work. There are highly qualified unemployed people who could do it, given some training. I appreciate the work will be temporary but it might be the job experience these people need that would get them through an interview and get them a job. Instead, we will pay pensions to people while paying them to do this work. The Minister must examine this again. I appreciate there is a time issue, that we need to clear the backlog and that training takes time. At the same time, however, he might be able to bring in people further up the chain within the Department and then bring others in who would need less training to do other jobs. There are people in the Department who do not necessarily process these claims now but who have been in an office answering telephones and taking messages for years. They have quite an amount of experience and could move. I ask the Minister to look at that issue again.

It was made clear in two reports last week who was responsible for the mess the country is in but those people will not pay the price. Many, including the Taoiseach and some of the bankers, are still in their jobs while others have retired on pensions that most people would find nauseating to consider. With today's Bill, however, as with the last Social Welfare Bill in December, we will make people who had no hand, act or part in the economic collapse of this country pay the price. I appreciate the Minister has had his brief for only a few months but why, in the past 13 years, did the Government not give attention to the idea of activating people when we had the work in which to place them? That was an opportunity squandered. Now, because we need to make savings or, as the Minister terms them, adjustments, social welfare recipients will pay the price.

There is also a contradiction in what the Minister said about the one parent family payment in that the Minister, Deputy Lenihan is quoted as stating that the Minister for Social Protection was making the payment changes to the one parent family payment to save money. I assume this was the Minister of State, Deputy Conor Lenihan, but, at any rate, it was one of the Ministers named Lenihan. The Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, has come out since and said the opposite. There is some degree of confusion on that. I am concerned about that point and about social welfare recipients paying the price.

I wish to deal with the issue of one parent family payments. This group seems to be the only one singled out for activation without having opportunities given to them. I appreciate there was an expectation that changes would be made and, to be fair to this Minister, he bit the bullet that his three immediate predecessors failed to bite because this has been talked about repeatedly, for a long time. It is four years since the report on one parent families was published and in that time all we have had from the Government is commentary about the report. No work was done in those four years to facilitate the orderly provision of the range of supports needed to ensure that the people who will lose the payment will have the chance to participate in meaningful work, education or training. The Minister does not have any real plan to achieve this.

Section 24 provides for the reduction of the qualifying age from April 2011, linked to when the youngest child reaches the age of 13. It provides for transitional arrangements up to 2016. Ironically, the date the Minister has chosen for this to take place is the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, when we pledged to cherish all children of the nation equally. However, the transitional arrangements do not take account of the practical issues and only take account of age. They do not take account of issues such as transportation or child care. The Minister stated in his speech today that a new scheme for child care is promised from September. He promised a scheme to people who would be affected by the carbon tax but that did not come. We were promised a scheme to assist people who have difficulty with their mortgages and that has not come. We are obliged to pass this legislation in the coming weeks based on a promise which I find very difficult to do because the people I represent want to know what will happen.

I also have a difficulty regarding parents of children with special needs. There is a provision in regard to domiciliary care allowance but one can have a child with special needs who is not in receipt of domiciliary care allowance because of the type of need he or she has. This does not mean this child of 13 is suitable to be left at home alone. That point will have to be re-examined because there will be lone parents of a child with special needs, who, because of whatever type of need that child has - it may be purely behavioural - cannot be left to mind himself or herself after school finishes. Linking this to the domiciliary care allowance is not enough.

The transitional arrangements are dates and timelines and even in that they are unfair. As Deputy Shortall pointed out in the briefing, and as has been said to me by some people, these are designed almost to ensure that a person who is now in low income employment would be as well off to leave that job. If such people have a job that is not secure or is at risk of ending and they have not applied for, nor are in receipt of the one parent family payment, if they lose their job in the next few months or during these transitional arrangements they will not be eligible to apply if their child is aged 13. If they were in receipt of the payment now, however, and if the child is aged 12 years and 6 months, they will be eligible. That must be examined again. It was raised with the Minister's officials that day but the Minister has not said there will be any amendments in its regard.

The real crunch of this issue concerns how the Minister will facilitate this group of people into meaningful work. I want to hear more from the Minister on this. It is the reason I oppose the Bill. I have no faith in the tangled web which is how I describe the education and training currently on offer. In any event, I wonder how the current system could cope with the additional people. When a child reaches the age of 13, the parent will lose the payment. That means that he or she must start the training prior to that, for example, if he or she wants to do a basic degree. I have no concept of what the Minister means by education or training in this regard. What type is he talking about? A FÁS course can be anything from a week in length to a year or more and then there are universities and institutes of technology. People will have different requirements and we have to be able to open their minds to the possibility of doing something more than they may have thought possible. I do not believe the system in place will allow them to do that.

If a person wants to do a basic degree that means leaving a child aged 10 years because the payment will be lost when the child is 13. Therefore, one must have used the three years prior to that to get the basic degree and have any hope of getting a job from it. Again, I imagine many parents would feel that leaving their child at home, aged 10, is not an option. Where will they get the money to have that child cared for while they are doing the education and training? There are basic infrastructural practicalities all over the place in this regard.

Another basic point is that schools open at 9 a.m. When I had the education portfolio, and also in my constituency work, parents raised with me the fact that nobody is in charge of their children in school before that time. The school is not responsible and does not wish to know. There is a problem because a great number of FÁS courses start at 8.30 a.m. If the parents are going to have to leave before their children are in secondary school they will have to drop them off and that issue needs to be examined because schools will not take responsibility for them. I have spoken to headmasters and tried to reason with them, asking if somebody can do the job. They say they are not insured and that is the answer.

Sixty per cent of current one parent family payment recipients are already engaged in work and 80% are engaged in work, education or training. The Minister has not outlined any vision or plan as to how he hopes to achieve their activation. I do not believe the stick on its own will work. We need to work with these families and engage with them. They want the best outcome for themselves and they definitely want the best outcome for their children but they must be supported in that. Last week I asked the Minister's officials how this would work in practical terms. They said that when the legislation was passed all the individuals in question would be written to, which is fair enough. When their youngest child reaches 10 years of age, the parents will be advised about what is available and they can get in touch with facilitators. They mentioned the pilot FÁS social inclusion model. In the first place, I have difficulty with the notion that we will base all of this on a social inclusion pilot, when we have not got results of the pilot. The Minister's predecessor also thought facilitators were the answer to everything. For any problem I raised there were facilitators and they were the men and women to deal with it.

To be fair, any facilitator to whom I have spoken has been outstanding. They are very fair people and they are hard working. They try to go the extra mile to facilitate people and see how the rules can be examined to do this. They do a great job, but there are only 63 of them, while there are 439,000 people unemployed, over 100,000 on disability and illness benefit, and almost 90,000 one parent family payments. It is a physical impossibility to cover that, and I do not see how activation can happen, especially when there is around 20% who are not currently engaged in work, education or training and who will need a ferocious amount of help. How will it happen? That is the question that needs to be answered and that is my real concern. Payment cuts without that help is cruel to those people.

The discussion paper to which the Minister referred states quite clearly that activation is not simply focused on moving people into employment or low paid jobs. It states that activation encompasses interviews and advice meetings, education and training, and providing people with skills to enable them to achieve financial independence. I do not see the plan here on how we are going to do that. I want to see these men and women achieve their potential, and I do not want to see them dependent on welfare any more than the Minister, but I think they need to be fairly treated and properly helped, and I have a concern with how that is going to happen.

The Minister refers to other countries on this issue, and I have looked at other countries as well. We have a great tendency to pick out other countries as examples, without examining the whole system in other countries. When we look at the whole system in some of those countries, we see that they have the building blocks in place. They did not start with the cut and then work downwards. They started at the bottom and worked up and that is how we will have to approach this.

I have less difficulty with the changes proposed by the Minister to jobseeker's allowance and to the supplementary welfare allowance, to some extent. I see the logic behind them, but I would question the emphasis. Where is the plan to create jobs for these young people? The Minister's predecessor had a plan for young people in 2008. Since that time, 84% of those who have lost their jobs are under 34, while 83,000 people under 25 are on the dole. This latter figure ignores the thousands who have left this country and they are not going off on their holidays. They are going because they feel there is nothing here for them. They cannot survive on the payment that they are getting and they do not feel they have the education or training opportunities.

The Minister probably got the submission that I received from the National Youth Council of Ireland, which voices some real concerns about the provisions. These are principally about the lack of availability of education and training places, as well as the failure of the Government to deliver on previous commitments, for which two examples are cited. Only 919 of the 2,000 work placements and only 752 of the 2,500 college places for jobseekers announced in April 2009 have been filled. The council rightly questions the effectiveness of FÁS courses. There are some great FÁS courses, but we need to examine this and be honest in our appraisal of what is being achieved.

The council submission refers to the Forfás report and it finds that many of the courses have lost focus and are of little use to young people in getting work, and that there are high drop-out rates. There is very little point in spending money putting people through courses if they are going to drop out half way through them, or if the courses are not relevant to their needs. We do not want to see people doing courses because they are told to do so. The statistics might look good, but we will not achieve anything. These concerns cannot be ignored as we go through the proposals, and I would like some more information on this. There will be amendments on FÁS on Committee Stage, and I welcome that because it will give us a little more clarity. At the moment, I see it as operating under three Ministers, but I do not see how it is intended to operate.

The changes are needed by the people who are unemployed. They are also needed by the employers who are struggling. The Minister's officials pointed out that we do not need legislation for the employer PRSI incentive scheme but it would give us reassurance when debating this Bill if we knew that was in place. It is another promise given in last year's budget, but we have not seen any action on it, besides press statements. If we knew that was in place, it would be one positive measure to which we could point as an example of something the Government has done to facilitate people in getting back to work. That is not there and I would like to see it in place before we proceed with this Bill. The Government promised €36 million for the initiative, so it is important that it be introduced without delay.

I would now like to go through a few specific sections of the Bill. In section 5, which deals with the refund of PRSI contributions, I want clarity on whether the people have a four year window within which they can claim a refund, or whether they can only claim a refund to the value of four years. During our briefing, the Minister's representatives told us that it was not always appropriate to get a doctor's certificate in certain instances, and swine flu was given as the big example. The amendment to section 6 seems reasonable in that respect but it is important that a certificate is provided in all but the most exceptional cases, particularly if we want to combat fraud. It is important that the section is not open to abuse, so I would like to hear a bit more from the Minister on that.

Section 7 corrects an omission from the second 2009 Act to provide for the restoration of the full rate of payment for recipients of the incapacity supplement aged 66 and over. How many people were affected by that omission? Sections 8,10 and 12 contain the clarifying provisions on job seeker's allowance, pre-retirements, the farm assist scheme and the payments to spouses or partners in receipt of family income supplement. Is the purpose of this provision to ensure that people get less? Is it just a clarifying provision?

I brought up section 14 with the Minister's officials. This deals with the power of the Minister to appeal to the High Court on a point of law, where he disagrees with the chief appeals officer. Can the Minister explain the purpose of this amendment a bit more? I appreciate that the Social Welfare Appeals Office is separate, even though it is still under the Department, but I would be concerned if situations were arising that the chief appeals officer was so out of step with legislation that he was not accurately interpreting the law and that the Minister was running to the High Court to correct mistakes that the officer was making. Is there a reason that this has suddenly come up? Has the Minister received advice that this is an issue that may be coming up?

We had a group before the joint committee a few weeks ago who spoke about the registration of people who died outside of Ireland. There is a requirement to amend the Civil Registration Act 2004. I do not know whether that can be done through this Bill. We had amendments to health legislation last year through a social welfare Bill, and there is a strong feeling that this registration needs to be done and people would like to see action.

The Minister is making some changes to the structures of the appeals office and other offices. I have a letter here containing a query about social welfare branch offices. Some of the particular difficulties on backlogs have arisen in respect of branch offices. There is much to-ing and fro-ing, where issues that come into the branch office are passed elsewhere to be handled there and so on. Legislation was passed a few years ago that would allow branch offices to become deciding offices and authorise their own claim load, and that this would significantly speed things up. I do not know the Minister's view on that, but it is something that could be considered. Difficulties in my own constituency have made me very aware of the difficulties people face when the backlogs are there.

The Minister stated that he was going to bring in amendments in respect of FÁS. I am concerned about the status of the Office for Social Inclusion. We had a long running battle in this House on the closure of the Combat Poverty Agency, or the "subsuming" of the office by the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, which is the polite way of putting it. The Minister's Department is now called the Department of Social Protection, and I find it hard to visualise how that Department cannot have the Office for Social Inclusion in it. A commitment was made a few years ago that all decisions made by every Department would be poverty proofed.

Several years ago there was a commitment that all decisions taken by every Department would be poverty proofed and would be looked at with regard to the impact of poverty and how it would be likely to affect people. How will this happen in the Department of Social Protection? What role and communication will the Office for Social Inclusion have now? Will it be the same as it will have with the Departments of Education and Skills, Environment, Heritage and Local Government and Health and Children or will it examine the Department's enormous role in tackling poverty? That is its remit also but it is based in an entirely separate Department. Clarity on how that will work is very important.

Earlier, I briefly referred to the carbon tax. We were led to believe by last year's budget that changes would be made or that there would be some sort of easing for people in vulnerable positions, particularly people dependent on certain social welfare payments, to cope with that carbon tax. It has been introduced on many fuels and will be fully in place in September. I expected something in the Bill to deal with this and I am very surprised that there is not. This is a particularly thorny issue in my constituency and in a number of other constituencies because people whose families have done so for generations have been prohibited from cutting turf. There will be a scheme for one year with regard to this but that will not help people in the long term. Will the Minister examine this issue again?

The Minister has decided it is appropriate to proceed with section 23. Why? What is the reasoning for this? I cannot understand how the Minister could take a decision to make the big change of publishing names, addresses and fines and then pull back from it. It works effectively from a tax perspective. Are there more hard cases in the social welfare system? I question this change and I would like the Minister to answer on this.

Fraud does not necessarily need legislation but much more concentration and emphasis. I am concerned about a proposal or a pilot scheme to allow people to sign on by mobile phone. Perhaps the reports are inaccurate and this is a good opportunity for the Minister to clarify those reports. There are very genuine concerns about this. While I am all for technology and for using it in effective ways, perhaps the Minister could concentrate on using existing technology to make the Revenue Commissioners aware of what landlords are the ultimate recipients of rent supplements and such matters prior to considering allowing people to sign on to receive social welfare payments from wherever they are in the world. The Minister has not clarified it sufficiently for people to be reassured.

See this speech in context