Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 8:

In page 8, after line 32, to insert the following: “(1) Within three months of the passing of this Act, the Minister shall prepare and lay before the Oireachtas a report on the benefits, or not, to benchmark and index welfare rates against inflation.”.

The Minister knows I raised this last week and before that. Age Action Ireland has performed a strong analysis and found that the increases in the pension and working-age welfare payments have lost their spending power. Based on inflation to date and the Government's projected rate of inflation for 2022 and 2023, working-age payments will have lost €32.27 per week in spending power by the end of 2023 and the State pension will have lost €42.54 per week, despite the additional €12 from January. This loss of spending power is so extreme because of the cumulative effect of inflation. A nominal €10 in December 2023 will only afford a person what €7.76 would have bought in December 2020. By the end of 2023, a working-age welfare payment of €220 will buy 15.9% less than €203 would buy in December 2020. The €265.30 State pension income will buy 17.1% less than the €248.30 payment bought in December 2020.

Raising welfare by €20 in 2023 would not erase most of this lost spending power but is the least that must be done to limit the inevitable increase in poverty and deprivation next year. I am not arguing that the one-off payments are not helping people. They are, but we are talking about a baseline. There have been calls before to keep pension and working-age payments in line with inflation. We have not seen the type of inflation we have seen in the past year or year and a half, so it is more important that we look at it and bring forward a report on it.

I will give the Minister some figures for the working-age payment by year. In December 2020 it was €203. There was no annual loss of spending power. In December 2021, it was €203, that is, for two years there was no increase. The loss of spending power was €10.62 per week or €554 per year. In December 2022, it was €208. The loss of spending power per week was €20.71, which was €1,080 for the year. In December 2023, it will be €220 and the loss of spending power will be €32.37 per week or €1,688 per year. The figures are strong and warrant a serious look. There should be a report on indexing of social welfare payments with inflation.

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