Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As everything has been said, I will just make a few brief points. I am looking forward to the publication of the Government's impact assessment of tax and social welfare changes. What period this will cover, I do not know or care, provided it gives a comprehensive account of what we want measured and gives an indication of the priorities for changes in the future.

There is no doubt that the cuts in child benefit have had a severe impact because of the cost of child care. When in government, we introduced substantial increases in child benefit which were designed to help people to meet the cost of child care. In retrospect, it was a mistake to do it in that way, for a variety of reasons that I will not go into now. The cuts have made child care even more unaffordable.

The rent caps have been an unmitigated disaster. I have experience of the issues involved from dealing with constituents on a daily basis. The caps are responsible for a situation where thousands of children and their parents are living in unsuitable accommodation, in hotel rooms, hostels and bed and breakfast accommodation, etc., because they can no longer afford to pay private sector rents which can no longer be supported by rent allowance because of the caps. I do not suggest that if the cap was raised, the Government would have to pay an amount proportionate to the new cap. The cap could be raised, but we could keep the same maximum level of support or allowance. This would save many of the people who are on the margin. Another impact of the rent caps has been that they have driven people into the most unsuitable accommodation. The caps are forcing many people in my city to live in kips.

It is said the problem is not money, but I believe money it is. It is the issue in raising the rent caps. I do not accept for one moment that if we were to raise them, rents would automatically increase. This is not like the grant for new houses which builders supposedly added on to the price automatically. This is a situation where the market demands a certain rent, but the State states it cannot support people in paying that rent, if it is above a certain amount, despite the fact that rents are rising substantially. If the Government meets its €2.2 billion commitment for the provision of more housing in the next so many years, that will exert downward pressure on rents.

On lone parents, I welcome the amendment introduced on Committee Stage to prevent the erosion of the amount a lone parent can earn and still qualify for lone parent's allowance. In my experience, significant numbers of lone parents - probably the majority - are working in low paid or part-time employment. The Minister states a centrepiece of Government policy is to encourage people to go out to work. If we look at the changes being made such as the reduction in the age to 14 years which means that once a child reaches 14 years the lone parent must transfer to jobseeker's allowance, they mean that a lone parent will earn less because the means test for jobseeker's allowance is more rigid than that for lone parent's allowance. All the reduction in the amount a lone parent can earn - down to €90 per week - has done is place lone parents who work, and only them, at a disadvantage. If a lone parent wants to stay at home or he or she is on jobseeker's allowances and stays at home, the rate is the same. The impact is on a lone parent who is working. I find it peculiar for the Government to state it can encourage people to go out to work by reducing the financial benefit in doing so. That seems a contradiction in terms.

I look forward to the Government's impact statement and hope it will bring these matters to light and inform Government policy in the future.

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