Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Central Statistics Office, CSO, survey on income and living conditions, for 2015 shows that for lone-parent households, the consistent poverty rate is 26.2%, up from 25% in 2014, that the deprivation rate fell from 58.7% in 2014 to 57.9% in 2015 and that the at-risk-of-poverty rate is essentially unchanged at 36.2%, compared to 36.5% in 2014, a slight fall but not one that is statistically significant. The figures show that the consistent poverty rate for children fell by 1.2 percentage points to 11.5% in 2015. This means that 13,000 children were lifted out of poverty in 2015. The latest SILC statistics also show that being at work reduces the consistent poverty rate for lone parents by three-quarters to 6.7%. This demonstrates beyond doubt that the best way to tackle poverty among lone parents is through employment and that remains our policy.

The full impact of the recovery is not reflected in these 2015 statistics. Unemployment has now fallen to below 7% and long-term unemployment is below 4%, its lowest level in eight years. The positive impact of recent budgets on lone parents and the full impact of the increase in employment are also not reflected in these figures.

Continued economic recovery - together with these budget measures - is likely to have impacted positively on poverty rates since 2015 and this improvement is expected to continue over the coming years.

My Department's social impact assessments of budgets 2015, 2016 and 2017 are an indicator of this improvement. These showed a cumulative increase of 4% in the average household income of employed lone parents and 6.9% for unemployed lone parents, comparing favourably with an average household increase of 3.3%.

I am also committed to delivering the independent report on the one-parent family payment reforms as quickly as possible so that it can help inform budget 2018 discussions. This report will, among other things, take into account the poverty rates of those impacted by the reforms.

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