Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome and support the motion. I will start by responding to the Minister's response to the point that is raised in the motion about the establishment of a discretionary fund. It is true to say that the community welfare service makes discretionary payments and nobody would argue against that. What worries me, however, is the fact that the number of people who are receiving payments is not very high, especially with regard to exceptional needs payments and urgent needs payments. In a response I received directly from the Minister, I was told that in 2021, more than 2,300 exceptional needs payments amounting to €750,000 were made to assist with household bills and heating costs. To the end of March of this year, some 780 exceptional needs payments amounting to €167,000 had been made across the entire State to assist with household bills and heating costs.

Most of us in this House have been around a long time. We all deal with CWOs and the Department of Social Protection but something is not computing in respect of the volume of figures I have shared. I have noticed a trend in the past five or six years, while also noting the excellent work that individual CWOs do for their clients, service users and people who come to them, in exercising their discretion. We do not have the exact evidence for my assertion yet but one hopes one's political gut hopefully serves one well. A centralising tendency is creeping into the Department of Social Protection, which is trying to reduce the number of payments that are going out under the supplementary welfare allowance or through exceptional needs payments and urgent need payments. People's access to those payments is being suppressed. That is not happening at CWO level, but when dealing with people who come to my office, I find I am more often ringing the 0818 number. There is increasingly a suppression of that human interaction between the person who is applying and the deciding officer. The point is that I believe strongly that the Department is by stealth trying to take the discretionary element out of those key payments. We agree they exist but we also agree, now we are all interacting with each other again, that we need to go back to a model whereby people can have a walk-in service. That is what we are talking about. We want the walk-in service to be resumed. We need the element of discretion to be embedded into the structures again.

I do not understand why applications are more often going up the line to somebody who has no relationship whatsoever with the applicant or has not had a human interaction with the applicant. It runs contrary to the foundations of the supplementary welfare allowance scheme as it was established by former Deputy Frank Cluskey all those years ago. We need to go back to that. There is unmet demand out there. People find it difficult to engage directly and increasingly we, as Deputies, are interfacing to try to contextualise people's individual stories. We all know what the stories are. We know exactly where people are struggling. It is well evidenced at this stage and is plain for everybody to see.

It is not just people who depend on the Department of Social Protection for their income who are struggling. The working poor are also struggling. We need to find some mechanism, through schemes such as the supplementary welfare allowance, for example, to provide for a greater number of urgent needs payments. I am poring over numbers. In October 2021, 24 urgent needs payments were made, if the figures I received in response to a parliamentary question are to be believed and we take the figures provided by the Department absolutely at face value. In November, 36 such payments were made. In December, 38 were made. In January, 26 were made. In February, 25 were made. In March, there was an upward spike to 45. Those are the figures for urgent needs payments, which is a specific category. Those numbers worry me. I can conclude there is a deliberate suppression in the number of people who are applying and refused payments. We do not have those figures but they will come out in due course, I am sure, when the right questions are asked. The alternative conclusion is that the level of discretion has been taken away. Neither God nor man could convince me that in March only 45 people throughout the country applied specifically for urgent needs payments. That is based on a reply to a parliamentary question I received lately. If I am misquoting figures, somebody will correct me. I am happy to be corrected, but I have the information here in black and white.

We keep raising the issue of the fuel allowance and access to it. I know it is not the most important topic during these summer months. However, it will not be long until we are into the autumn and winter months again and the issue will be high on the political agenda.

I have called previously in this House for some sort of scheme to be put in place for certain people. While it is acknowledged that there has been an increase in the fuel allowance for those in receipt of it, there is a whole category of people who have worked all their lives, put children through college and are living in C-, D- and E-rated houses. They do not have access to grants and do not have the means to upgrade their houses, but they could very well do with an additional supplementary payment for fuel. If the Government were to create a second category to encapsulate those people who have a modest occupational pension or a contributory pension and who do not meet the criteria for access to the fuel allowance, it would be a good day's work.

Very many of the people to whom I refer, because they are of a certain age, would have voted Fianna Fáil historically. It would be a fair assessment to extrapolate that they have probably turned away from Fianna Fáil but maybe Fianna Fáil could go back and look at that category of people, if at all possible. I urge the Green Party and Fine Gael to do the same because this is all coming into sharp relief at a time when there is a fuel crisis. That is a very obvious thing to say but if it is possible to create a second category for the fuel allowance that would encapsulate far more people, that would give them just a little bit of headroom and see them through the next winter. The same Minister of State was in the House the last time I raised this during the debate on a previous motion. I hope to address the line Minister with policy responsibility for this in due course as well. We have to look after those people. They made the biggest sacrifices in this country in the 1970s and 1980s when they paid big money in taxation and still they were able to educate children and put them through college. I am probably a product of that system, dare I say it.

I support the motion. It is a worthwhile motion but we must look again at the role of the community welfare officer. We need to buttress that facility. The community welfare officers that I deal with know the people they are dealing with well. They know the personalities and they are embedded within their communities. The level of discretion they have is paramount and is key to protecting people and we need to go back to that, back to the well.

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