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

Even at a time of relatively low unemployment, there are still 300,000 people who come on and off the live register in a given year. Of those, perhaps 10,000 might be subjected to reduced payments. It is a very small percentage of people who have their payments reduced. It is not as if it is 10% or even 5%. It is considerably less than that, so it is important to bear that in mind. There are two reasons that there has been an increase in the frequency with which penalty rates have been applied, and there has been an increase. First, this provision only commenced in 2010 when it was introduced by the then Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, in the Act to which I referred earlier. It was always going to start off at a lower point than where it ended. The second reason is that there is far more one-to-one engagement. When there was a large number of jobseekers, and Intreo had not yet been established and JobPath had not been contracted, there was little one-to-one engagement. Now, it is far more common so there has been an increase in the number of those sanctioned. I do not anticipate the number escalating much further. It will probably stabilise this year in the 10,000 to 12,000 range.

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