Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his question. Child benefit is the main policy instrument for assisting families with the costs of raising children.

It is a universal payment, which I very much support. It is paid in respect of all qualified children up to the age of 16, or to the age of 18 if they are in full-time education or have a disability. It is paid monthly to more than 630,000 families in respect of more than 1.2 million children at an annual cost of €2.1 billion of taxpayers' money. Safeguarding the child benefit budget is a priority and in this regard the Department takes a proactive approach to ensuring it is only paid to eligible families.

The scheme operates a control programme aimed at ensuring that payment of child benefit is made where there is an ongoing entitlement and payment stops once this entitlement ceases.  Some 300,000 eligibility reviews are undertaken annually for this purpose.

The Deputy refers to a commitment in the programme for Government to reform the monitoring of child benefit payments by amalgamating the two existing school attendance monitoring systems, currently run by the Department of Education and Skills and Tusla, in order to address poor school attendance within some families.  Considerable legal, technical and data protection issues are presented by the exchange of information between schools and my Department.  There are particular issues concerning the disclosure of sensitive personal information regarding a child's circumstances which may not be relevant to the parent's entitlement to child benefit.  In the meantime, I am satisfied with the existing control and review policy pertaining to the child benefit scheme. I believe it ensures payment is only made to families with an ongoing entitlement.

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