Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

These are the measures I had proposed to reform disability allowance and domiciliary care allowance. I am sorry if these proposals caused anxiety among people with disabilities and their families. I have listened, in particular, to the concerns of families with severely disabled children and asked a barrister, Ms Ita Mangan, who chairs the advisory group on tax and social welfare issues and her committee's group to carry out a review of domiciliary care allowance and disability allowance with reference to children and young adults.

I will now outline the main provisions of the Bill. Section 3 provides for the abolition of entitlement to payment of disablement benefit in the case of assessments of loss of faculty amounting to less than 15%, with effect from the beginning of January 2012.

Section 4 provides for discontinuing the entitlement to payment of a half-rate qualified child increase where the spouse, civil partner or cohabitant of the beneficiary has a weekly income in excess of a prescribed amount of €400 in the case of new claimants of carer's benefit, the State pension - contributory, the State pension - transition, and invalidity pension, with effect from the beginning of July 2012. The section also extends the reference to the spouse of the beneficiary. Existing claimants in receipt of half-rate qualified child increase will not be affected.

Section 5 provides that the implementation of certain provisions of Schedule 6 to the Social Welfare (Consolidation) Act 2005, relating to changes in the entitlement conditions for the State pension - contributory - and the State pension - transition, with effect from 6 April 2012, will not apply to existing recipients of these pensions.

Section 6 provides for increasing the number of qualifying contributions required to qualify for widow-widower's and surviving civil partner's contributory pension. Existing pensioners will not be affected by these changes. I will be proposing an amendment on Committee Stage to change this section to increase the number of paid PRSI contributions required to qualify for these pensions from 156 to 260 from December 2013.

Section 7 provides for the discontinuance, with effect from January 2012, of the transitional measures which enable the one-parent family payment to continue to be paid for a period of up to six months where a claimant's weekly earnings exceed €425. Existing OPFP recipients who are benefiting from these transitional measures at the beginning of January 2012 will continue to receive the transitional payment for the unexpired balance of the six month period.

As I said, I will be proposing an amendment on Committee Stage to withdraw sections 8 to 10, inclusive, of the Bill.

Section 11 provides for the discontinuance of the payment of the grant for multiple births under the child benefit scheme with effect from 1 January 2012. It also provides for the phased alignment of the different rates of monthly child benefit payable, according to family size, into a single rate. The rates payable to the third and subsequent qualified children will be reduced with effect from 1 January 2012 and further reduced from 1 January 2013, when there will be a single rate of €140 for each qualified child.

Section 12 reduces the period for backdating claims to long-term contributory pensions such as the contributory State pension and other payments from up to 12 months before the claim was made to six months. The new backdating arrangements will apply to claims for such payments made from the beginning of April 2012.

Section 13 amends the rules relating to the assessment of means for certain social assistance payments, including the abolition of the income disregard for income from employment by the HSE as a home help in the case of all social assistance payment schemes, and increasing the proportion of income from farming and fishing assessed as means from 70% to 85% for the purposes of the farm assist and jobseeker's allowance schemes. These amendments apply to new and existing claimants of the relevant schemes with effect from 1 January 2012.

Section 14 provides that for the purposes of calculating means for the one parent family payment, the weekly earnings disregard is being decreased from €146.50 over a five year period to the same rate as for job seekers. The annual reductions in the weekly disregard will apply both to new and existing OPFP claimants.

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