Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have a brief opportunity to comment on the Social Welfare, Pensions and Civil Registration Bill 2018. There are welcome features in the Bill, including the increased maternity, adoptive and paternity benefits; the increases and proportionate increases in social protection payments; and the measures to address the budget 2012 pension anomaly, to which my colleague has referred. In my pre-budget submission to the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, which I entitled A Budget For All Our People, I asked for at least a general rise of €7 per week, which the Department costed for me at €485.94 million, which is nearly €500 million, among other general increases, some of which I will touch on later. It is regrettable that the increases provided for in the Bill will not take effect until March 2019. Households will be under extreme pressure during the Christmas and New Year period and the March provision, as in 2018, is simply to push necessary Exchequer expenditure into the future.

Sections 10 and 11 extend the provisions in the Act to ensure care-leavers receive the full rates of jobseeker's allowance and supplementary welfare allowance, rather than age-related reductions. That is very welcome.

Section 12 sets out that domiciliary care allowance will be paid for three months after the death of the child being cared for. I welcome that the Minister has introduced that in the Bill.

The total budget 2019 package for the Department was €20.5 billion, about 46% of which is composed of the social insurance fund. The budget office gave us a brief note on it. It is €9.3 billion from social insurance and €10.8 billion of actual additional Government expenditure.

The Department of Finance has rigorously suppressed social welfare spending to the €19 billion to €20 billion range over the past eight years of austerity. The expenditure ceiling included €14 million capital expenditure and allowed for savings of €50 million due to increasing employment figures which meant fewer people on the live register. With the big surplus in the social insurance fund, the Minister could have been more expansive. There are many other issues she could have addressed or paid back for longer periods such as the 2012 people. The Minister had more than enough money to have gone to €7 a week. That is the reason I proposed it.

I also called for the income disregard - I give the Minister credit for this - for the one parent family payment to be restored to €146 per week and the Minister has brought it to €150 per week, which is noteworthy and creditable. Recent research by the ESRI funded by our excellent Parliamentary Budget Office on the gender impact of Irish budgetary policy shows clearly that women were most adversely affected by the austerity budgets from 2008 to 2012. Some of those budgets were supported by the Minister. I welcome the increased focus on the worrying trend of the feminisation of poverty and homelessness. I would have liked to have seen the Minister read out an equality budget statement on budget day, which is what we called for on the Committee on Budgetary Oversight.

Perhaps the Government will consider working towards it if there is another budget during this Dáil or if there is any other opportunity. The most vulnerable are always targeted because they are the least likely to have the time, energy or money to stand up for themselves. I spoke recently on the excellent gender budgeting report produced by the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and I await the Department’s social impact assessment of budget 2019.

I welcome the increase in the qualified child payment and I hope it will have a positive impact on child poverty. As my colleague said, youth unemployment is still concerning. More than 14,000 people under the age of 26 are on the weekly jobseeker’s payment of €107.70, while more than 2,000 are in receipt of €152 per week. Given the resources at the Department's disposal, it could have moved towards equalisation in this regard. I am also disappointed to see the age-related discrimination in social welfare payments continue. I notice the Minister abandoned the Action Plan for Jobs. She said she is bringing forward a new programme, but at least with the Action Plan for Jobs there was a programme we could use to measure whether the Government was achieving what it set out to achieve over the past number of years.

The increase in the national training fund levy from 0.8% to 0.9% is welcome, although I advocated an increase to 1%. Promoting apprenticeships, in particular among women, is important.

In regard to fuel poverty, I proposed an increase of €7 in the weekly rate of fuel allowance, at a cost of €72 million, and an extension of the season by four weeks. While the one week extension is welcome, additional resources were again available to the Department to do more.

Section 9 provides for the long awaited and much-debated aggregated contributions method for contributory State pension calculations, which will address the anomaly introduced in budget 2012. Two thirds or more of the pensioners are women, and I am glad the significant anomaly is finally being addressed for the 70,000 pensioners concerned. At last, they are being contacted and they will, I hope, be entitled to a higher pension rate with payments backdated to March 2018, although some of them have complained that they cannot see why it cannot be backdated to the period when they began their pension. Nonetheless, it is being rolled out for everyone from 2020, when the old averaging approach will be replaced by the new method.

I welcome section 20, whereby same-sex spouses and civil partners will have a right and entitlement to spousal pensions.

Section 4 provides for the new PAYE modernisation system that is coming into effect on 1 January 2019. It is a real-time system which seems to offer important advantages for workers and employers to ensure, as Revenue states, the right deductions are made at the right time, deducted from the right employees and paid by employers, which is a welcome development.

I also welcome changes to the principal Act in section 17 relating to earnings disregarded for disability allowance, blind pension and certain supplements payable under supplementary welfare allowance whereby the phrase “of a rehabilitative nature” is deleted. General employment will no longer be distinguished from employment of a rehabilitative nature.

The budget 2019 allocation for the disability sector was disappointing and I note the criticism from disability advocacy groups. In the press release at the time, the Minister stated she was providing funding of €300,000 to commission research into the cost of disability. As she will know, throughout my career in this House I have repeatedly suggested the introduction of a disability allowance because people with a disability bear an extra cost in their lives due to their disability. While a serious study on the matter is welcome, I wonder if it is just a sop to the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, who failed to start the programme this year and who may well be jettisoned by the Government during or after the next election. The Disability Federation of Ireland costed a payment of €20 per week and estimated it would cost approximately €130 million. Again, with the resources available, surely the Government could have begun this programme this year.

While partial restorations in the public sector have begun, following years of austerity, increases will not be paid until the end of March, a point which almost everyone has made.

The social protection system is a floor income to protect many citizens and it is known that social transfers reduce the risk of poverty. Pre-budget briefing papers reported: "In 2016, social transfers (excluding pensions) reduced the at-risk of poverty rate from 33.6% to 16.5%, or 17.1 percentage points in absolute terms. This represents a poverty reduction effect of 51%”. The Think-tank for Action on Social Change did much good work on this issue, showing that social transfers have a significant positive impact on low-income families. It is still the case in the social protection system, however, that applicants for so many benefits and forms of assistance must jump through various bureaucratic hoops.

It is time to look seriously at a basic income for all citizens. A few years ago, I tried to introduce a High Pay and Wealth Commission Bill which would ascertain levels of income and wealth at the higher end of society. My colleagues, Deputy Joan Collins and the Solidarity-People Before Profit have entered the same territory. We are talking about dividing the pie. We are supposed to be the second wealthiest country per capitaon the planet after Luxembourg, according to the most recent World Bank figures. Perhaps looking at the concept of a basic income as a right for every man, woman and child of our nation is the way that a Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection should proceed.

See this speech in context