Michael McCarthy (Labour)

While I acknowledge that the Minister is constrained by funding restrictions and the problem of changing schemes and introducing new measures which might impact on the administrative structure of the Department, I urge her to examine these requests and abolish the means test for carers.

There was a commitment to poverty-proofing in the revised national anti-poverty strategy. This meant that policy proposals would be analysed to see how they would affect the poor. The recent Budget Statement sets out the extent to which the Department of Finance has applied the poverty-proofing process to the budget. The Department is at best ambiguous about the process and misleading in the way it reports on it. The Department asserts that the analysis of poverty-proofing applies to the social welfare and income tax changes only. However, when referring to tax changes in general rather than income tax only, it asserts that the analysis "reflects the highly progressive nature of Budget 2003, which sees those depending on welfare getting the greatest gain".