Brendan Ryan (Dublin North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill in the House today. There are many provisions in the Bill on which I could comment but I will concentrate on just a few. Like others, I welcome the change in the Bill which ensures that part-time or retained firefighters will no longer miss out on jobseeker's payments because of a requirement that they reside near their stations. The practical solution put forward in the Bill will ensure that the proximity clause in itself does not render a claimant unavailable for full-time employment under the welfare code, provided they meet the other welfare requirements. This is a practical solution to a problem successive Governments since 1972 have failed to address. I urge the Minister to issue an immediate memo to the effect that any cases in the system involving retained firefighters that fall foul of existing legislation would be immediately resolved.

I wish to see further reforms this year in social protection. We must ensure that unemployed people who perhaps are not entitled to a payment due to their spouse's income, are eligible for further training and internship programmes. I have dealt with a number of cases, usually concerning middle-aged men, who are work-ready but find it difficult to compete with younger and perhaps more mobile jobseekers. We must create a mechanism whereby such jobseekers can apply for training places or for programmes such as JobBridge or Momentum.

Activation measures are only useful if they activate all jobseekers, regardless of whether they qualify for a means-tested payment. There is also a cohort of people who expected to be in receipt of a transition pension at the age of 65 but will now have to wait for another year to claim their old age pension. I refer to people aged perhaps between 60 and 65 who are now considered as jobseekers. There should be a formal acknowledgement by the Department of the extra challenges faced by this pre-retirement group when rolling out the Pathways to Work activation measures. I am interested to hear the Minister's plans in this area.

Common sense has been applied to one-parent family recipients in the Bill with the roll-out of the new jobseeker's transition scheme. The scheme is an offshoot of jobseeker's allowance and will exempt lone parents from the full rigour of the requirement for those receiving jobseeker's allowance to be available for full-time work. Availability for part-time work will provide full eligibility. The initiative is to be welcomed. In parallel, we must continue to pursue the provision of cost-effective, quality child care arrangements to further support the movement of lone parents back into the workforce. That is something on which I will continue to work and will continue to raise with the Minister and her Cabinet colleagues. The Minister is on record on this matter herself. I welcome her reiteration of the position today.

I refer to the enhanced identity authentication requirements for claiming social welfare. It is vital that we strengthen the control of our finite and reducing social welfare expenditure. The issuing of identity cards with biometric photographs and electronic signatures will act as a defence against false claims. However, I urge the Minister to provide assurances that there will be human oversight of the system. We must ensure that should any mistake be made with the new system that results in recipients losing a payment in error, those unfortunate recipients are not bogged down in an appeals process for a payment they should never have lost. Fraudulent claims must be tackled, although not with a heavy-handed approach towards all social welfare recipients. Recent experience leads me to believe that people are guilty until proven innocent when it comes to social welfare investigations. That manifests itself when a person has his or her payment immediately cut off before an investigation or inspection even begins. Such a response can automatically send families into desperate financial situations. I accept that some claims arefraudulent, but in many cases people are cut off in error.

I call on the Minister to review the practice of immediate cut-offs and to replace it with a risk-based approach. I propose a flagging system, whereby, following a risk assessment, an individual may be advised that from a certain date he or she will be under investigation and should the investigation prove an instance of fraud or false claim then the payment will be taken away from the time the investigation began. An innocent until proven guilty system is required. It applies in the courts and we should also apply it in the social welfare system.

I wish to refer also to some other matters, some of which are contained in the Bill. A scheme to cater for the self-employed must be brought forward as a matter of urgency. Other speakers have referred to the issue. I welcome the change in the appeal system for the partial capacity payment. The changes to FIS assessments are welcome for lone parents. I hope such changes will in future apply to all FIS recipients. I look forward to the Minister's response on the issue. I congratulate the Minister on her determined efforts and success in resisting efforts to scapegoat social welfare recipients, on protecting the most vulnerable in society and promoting the value of welfare in a Keynesian context.

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