Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, United Left) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is like the continuation of a battering ram in regard to lone parents and access to social welfare for people. The Minister has continuously said how good the Irish social welfare system is and how it protects the most vulnerable. Other Deputies have said social welfare payments protected people because otherwise the gap between rich and poor would be much bigger.

This Bill is a continuous attack on those people who can least afford it. Section 3 relates to carer's benefit, carer's allowance and the respite care grant. Why do we have to include a line stating that "a person shall not be regarded as requiring full-time care and attention unless" when the Social Welfare (Consolidation) Act 2005 sets out the conditions whereby a person, who is the relevant person, can receive support through a carer's payment? I do not understand that and I did not hear an explanation from the Minister as to why this is needed. As FLAC pointed out very clearly, it is a negative law-making measure. It actually puts the requirement on the person applying for the carer's allowance for the person who needs it to prove it. The person making the decision looks at that first line and the rest of it is secondary. That is what they will be working from. Will the Minister explain why she deems it necessary to include that? It does not make sense and I fully support FLAC's recommendation that it should be deleted from the Bill.

The one-parent family payment has been crucial for lone parents for the past two decades. One Family, which has been very supportive of the one-parent family payment and of lone parents, has said that 53% of lone parents are already in the labour market. The figure was 35% two years ago but it has increased over the past two years. Lone parents are not a group of people who do not want to work. They do not need incentives to work; they need supports, better access to back to education and better access to employment which allows them to carry out their responsibilities to their children. They are a one-parent family and not a couple who, even at the best of times, find it difficult to balance the family care with their work responsibilities.

Some 53% of lone parents are already in the labour market and most are working poor. What is on offer today for the majority of people parenting alone is low wages or insecure or zero hour contracts, combined with no child care. This will not take one-parent families out of poverty.

Some 63% of lone parents suffer deprivation. The deprivation rate for lone parents is 230% higher than for the general population and 33% higher than for those who are unemployed. Some 53% of this cohort of people are in the workplace but they suffer the highest deprivation rate in Ireland.

We have been given a breakdown of the impact on lone parents of losing the one-parent family allowance. Perhaps on Committee Stage the Minister will provide her analysis of how the cut in the one-parent family allowance, the family income supplement, FIS, and the back to work family dividend impacts on income. According to the information a number of us have, a lone parent working 20 hours per week on the minimum wage of €8.65 with FIS and the fuel allowance receives approximately €453. If working 35 hours per week, it comes to approximately €479 per week. In July 2015 after this cut is implemented, a person working 20 hours per week will earn approximately €402 which is a loss of €50 because the wages will be €173, there will be no one-parent family payment, FIS will be €199.80, there will be no fuel allowance and the back to work family dividend will be €29.80. A person working 35 hours per week will have €454.50, which is a cut of €25. That increases as we move to 2016 when the back to work family dividend will be cut again to €14.90. In 2017, when there will be no back to work family dividend, the cut will be even greater.

The Minister is creating a situation where there will be no incentive to go back to work if one is earning less than what is currently being earned. As we know, this does not affect lone parents who are not in the workplace.

I welcome the fact the Minister said she is removing the 800 lone parents getting the carer's half allowance. However, lone parents in back to education are being badly affected. I refer to an e-mail I received because people can explain best themselves how these things impact on them. The e-mail stated that while challenged by the toxic narratives employed by the Department of Social Protection in regard to lone parents, there is no such thing as a lone parent who is unemployed. It stated that Ms Burton's Department and the Government have set about systematically dismantling the supports in place for them and are calling it progressive. The e-mail further stated that an example of the Minister's stated commitment to education is the removal of non-adjacent maintenance grant entitlement, the removal of the maintenance grant for postgraduate studies, the removal of entitlement to claim back to education, the cap on the child care assistance grant and the increase in the distance for non-adjacent grant from 36 km to 45 km and a variety of other changes.

This lone parent is saying that her MA, which she was going on to do, will become impossible for her. She will not be able to do it. We are creating another situation that discourages people to go into education and to further educate themselves. The Tánaiste must reassess this. I fully agree with FLAC when it says this should be reversed. the one-parent family payment should be fully restored. FLAC further recommends that a social impact assessment of the changes to the one-parent family payment be carried out in order to determine the extent to which the changes to the scheme have had a detrimental impact on one-parent family households.

The elephant in the room is the Tánaiste's emphatic statement in 2012, when we on this side of the House persisted to get an absolute commitment from her on child care. The Tánaiste was emphatic when she stated:

That is why I am undertaking tonight that I will only proceed with the measures to reduce the upper age limit to seven years in the event that I get a credible and bankable commitment on the delivery of such a system of child care by the time of this year’s budget. If this is not forthcoming, the measure will not proceed.

That is in the record of this House. The Tánaiste should stand over it. She should stand over her commitment to lone parents, abandon this change in the age limit and reintroduce the one-parent family payment. People have referred to the Minister as "the butcher of benefits" and "the ice queen" because of her approach to this. If the issue of lone parents is not dealt with, the Tánaiste will be branded with these names for the rest of her days and into history.

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