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

In the lead-up to the last general election, we had five regressive budgets. These are budgets where the main burden is shouldered by those who can least afford it. The configuration of this Dáil changed at the last general election and the Government has been dependent on us for support. We expected certain commitments arising from that support, and as a direct result, the past two budgets have been judged to be progressive, which I welcome. However, in welcoming the improvements both in the last Social Welfare Act and this current Bill, one must say we have a long way to go even to get back to where we were before 2010 if we consider the overall landscape.

For example, this Social Welfare Bill and the budget on which it is based did not address the question of the pension anomaly introduced as a result of changes in 2012. We had some discussion about this at the social welfare committee this morning and the Minister informed us that a report will be available shortly on this matter. Will she confirm that? The report will be referred to a Cabinet sub-committee, which will formulate a number of options for the Cabinet. As I understand it, this procedure is being undertaken because there is currently no money in the social welfare budget to effect changes. There is a design to get money from across Departments, I assume, in order to effect some changes in the area in 2018. There is no question of waiting until 2021, as that is completely out of the question. My understanding is that the Government could find the money from next year's budget but the sub-committee is being established in order to come up with the money before next year's budget, if possible. That is our policy objective and we will keep speaking with the Minister about it. The budget did not provide any top-up payment for people who cannot work due to illness or disability, and I will come back to that presently. The budget did not increase direct provision payments, which is a pity, as a small amount in this area would go a long way.

I am intrigued by the position with the working family payment. We were all given to understand this was the Government's big idea. We were told much research, study, analysis and reports were being done on it; the working family payment would be the panacea that would practically remove poverty traps once and for all, ensuring it paid people to work rather than staying on social welfare. We asked on a number of occasions if the family income supplement, which is designed to do something similar - imperfect as it may be - would be continued and we were told no decision had been made. However, two weeks ago during Question Time the Minister told me the family income supplement would be retained but as part of the overall working family payment. Strictly speaking, that is not correct. What we have is simply a renaming of the family income supplement as the working family payment.

I note that in the Fine Gael election manifesto there was some discussion on the family income supplement and the view was taken that it was not fit for purpose. Although it had many good features, it did not necessarily achieve what the Government wanted. We are now in a position where we are simply retaining it under another name, albeit with a few increases for different categories where there are one, two or three children. Strangely, whoever wrote that section of the Fine Gael election manifesto was partly right as there are difficulties with the family income supplement because it creates poverty traps that are easy enough to enumerate.

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They would be easy enough to get rid of too if the will was there. I, therefore, want the Minister, in her reply to refer to the changes the Government envisages in the future in the family income supplement to remove those obvious poverty traps.

We will have to concentrate on the living alone allowance in future budgets. It is not true to say that it costs two people twice as much to live as one person. All Members know what happens when there are two old age pensioners in a house. They get used to a certain standard of living that is not exorbitant by any means, but when one of them dies, the household income immediately drops by 50%. It falls off a cliff and the few paltry euros in the living alone allowance are not nearly sufficient to make up the difference. I know many pensioners, as I am sure the Minister does, who have fallen into poverty as a direct result of that situation. If the objective of the social welfare system is to combat poverty, a focus on the living alone allowance would be a good way to do it.

At a time when there is a lot of fuel poverty in the country and the cost of fuel has been increasing steadily, the fuel allowance is being increased by a grand total of €22.50 for the year. That €22.50 is one week's extra allowance for the year.

The bereavement grant has not been restored. I have come across problems in practice, as I am sure others have too. When someone cannot afford the cost of a funeral, they have to access the community welfare officer, who is now an employee of the Department of Social Protection. We in the mid-west find that the budget to help those people seems to exhaust itself after approximately three or four months. All those who are unlucky enough to have a bereavement in the latter part of the year can depend on is a pittance, if anything at all.

I note also that the pension increases which came into effect from around the 7th and various social welfare increases which came into effect from early March last year are now deferred, most to the very end of March. That is a very retrograde step. That is the danger when the date is moved. The practice used to be to have social welfare increases from 1 January and I hope that system can be reverted to.

I welcome the provision of invalidity pensions for the first time for the self-employed but several things remain to be done. The question of jobseeker's benefit for the self-employed needs to be addressed. The Minister suggested some time ago to a committee of which I am a member that this should come, like invalidity pensions for the self-employed, out of general taxation. However, several reports and studies indicate that the self-employed would be delighted to fund that measure. If they wish to fund it, they should be given the opportunity to do so. As regards self-employed people who fall out of work due to illness, not all of them will be out of work for life and the question of short-term illness benefit for the self-employed will have to be attended to in the not too distant future.

The general statistics on poverty are still quite striking. The Minister may say that the survey on income and living conditions, SILC, figures are not up to date and none are available for the past couple of years when the economy has been growing. However, the worrying thing about the poverty statistics is that the economy began to grow again towards the end of 2013 and continued to grow during 2014 and 2015. However, the impact of that economic growth on the poverty statistics was very marginal. For example, consistent poverty dropped from 8.8% to 8.7% between 2014 and 2015. The deprivation rate in 2015 was 25% and the at-risk poverty rate was 16.9% compared to 17.2% in 2014, which is a very marginal reduction. The figures for those classified as children are even more striking. The Government has a target of lifting 102,000 children out of consistent poverty by 2020 but at the current rate of progress, it does not have a hope of achieving that. We must not forget the 3,000 children who will be sleeping in emergency accommodation tonight. It is no exaggeration to say that they and their families have been failed by the State.

We cannot ignore the findings of a recently-published independent report about the impact of changes made to the one-parent family scheme by one of the Minister's predecessors, Deputy Joan Burton. The report states that the balance of evidence indicates that there is an increased probability of lone parents being at risk of poverty as a direct result of those changes. That echoes the findings of the Crosse Miller report. There have been a number of improvements for lone parents in this budget and the previous one, but it all seems to be an attempt to mitigate the consequences of what happened under Deputy Burton's regime and the changes she made. Surely it would be simpler to reverse the change until we have what Deputy Burton described as a Scandinavian-type child care system or something approximating to it. I say that because the all-party committee on social protection did a lot of work on this issue and issued a very detailed report that called for a more flexible and responsive system and got rid of many anomalies such as whether a person was entitled to something depending on what sort of tenure he or she held in his or her house. That report was all but ignored. The figures for poverty among lone parents are particularly stark. For example, the most recent figure for lone parents in consistent poverty is 26.2% or more than one in four. Some 32.2% were at risk of poverty and a staggering 57.9% experienced deprivation.

I referred previously to the question of people on disability allowance. People such as Senator John Dolan and his organisation have campaigned long and hard for a top-up payment for those on disability allowance. That is against a background of statistics that show that consistent poverty among the disabled rose starkly from 14.4% to 22.4 % between 2014 and 2015. The at-risk rate rose from 25.2% to 38.4% over the same period and the deprivation rate reached a staggering 53.2%, up from 51.3%. The argument will be made that the disabled is not a homogenous group and there are different categories of disabled people, all of whom have different needs, etc., and, therefore, rather than having one solution for everybody, we should target the individual provisions that exist to help the disabled. However, provision for the disabled has fallen by approximately 10% over the past five years and, therefore, that argument does not hold up. I do not know anybody who is disabled and is too ill or incapacitated to work who would not welcome or benefit from a top-up payment. That needs to be looked at carefully.

As regards pensions, I urge the Minister to get on with the auto-enrolment system. Pension coverage in the private sector is down to just over 40%. There is a two-tier pension system. The public sector has a funded, gold-plated defined benefit pension scheme, and good luck to it. However, the coverage rate for those employed in the private sector is down to 42% according to the figures I have. As the Minister is aware, auto-enrolment has been operating in the United Kingdom since 2012 and has resulted in a significant increase in coverage among private sector workers. We have been talking about this for ten years. The Taoiseach recently said it will take several years to introduce it. It is extremely urgent that we get on with it. It was adverted to in a report issued by the Department of Social Protection eight years ago, in 2009 or 2010.

It is extremely urgent we get on with that. We will not be opposing the Social Welfare Bill 2017 on Second Stage but we will submit amendments on Committee Stage, some of which will cost the Exchequer nothing, some of which will cost a very small amount but will bring about very significant improvements for the people at whom they are directed. We will discuss all that next week, hopefully, if we are still around, on Committee Stage.

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