Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Social Welfare and Pensions (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2013. I agree with the comments by Deputies Calleary and Spring in regard to the self-employed and welcome the first step the Bill takes to rectifying the anomaly whereby those who take a chance and try to establish a business are left without a safety net if they fall on difficult times. I look forward to a prompt report from the expert group established by the Minister so that the Government can act at the earliest opportunity.

I also welcome the provisions in the Bill on retained firefighters. In many areas of the country, including my own county of Wicklow, people generously give of their time for small or nominal sums of money in order to protect communities in times of emergency. It was a bugbear for many people that such individuals were deemed ineligible for the jobseeker's payment.

The changes made by the Bill to lone parent supports are particularly welcome. The introduction of a new jobseeker's transition arrangement will allow those who were formerly in receipt of the lone parent family payment to seek part-time work. This has been welcomed a progressive initiative by organisations like One Family which work with lone parents on a daily basis. One Family has described the new measures as a helpful stepping stone. We do not want a social welfare system with built in poverty traps and in the absence of these reforms we would have run the risk of the lone parent family payment becoming a poverty trap. The proposed transition mechanism will be extremely helpful in enabling single parents to balance their desire or need to work with their caring responsibilities for their children. I commend the measure.

I also welcome the measures to tackle fraud, an issue of concern for every taxpayer in this country and one which regularly arises in the Committee of Public Accounts.

Measures that require people, where necessary, to visit their local social welfare office to have their photograph taken and provide a signature to be scanned electronically and recorded on their file will go a long way towards cracking down on social welfare fraud. They will also help to ensure that the allocations to social welfare of more than €20 billion passed annually by this House will reach those who need them most and prevent people from engaging in fraud.

We need to bring stakeholders with us when introducing social welfare reforms. The Minister provided an excellent template for doing so when dealing with reform of the domiciliary care allowance. Rather than establishing an in-house expert group, she asked representatives of all the stakeholders, including the Carer's Association and groups representing children with autism and the parents of children with special needs, to outline their proposals for changing the domiciliary care allowance system. This process produced excellent proposals for change. We need a similar process to be applied in many other areas of the social welfare system in need of reform. Unfortunately in politics, one tends to hear announcements of rash changes to one or other payment structure at which point we scramble to engage in consultations only to find it is too late. I commend the Minister's efforts to change the domiciliary care allowance and ask her to explore the possibility of extending the model of bringing together all relevant stakeholders when reforming the systems and supports in place for carers.

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