Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. This is an important debate as it affords us an opportunity to re-examine the purpose of social welfare and the budgetary process. Clearly, the Minister's Department is the most important in terms of expenditure. It has a budget of ¤21 billion, almost 40% of total Government expenditure.

Some aspects of the budget have been very controversial. I will deal with them but will first address the overall picture. This is an important day on which to hear an overview of what social welfare is about. It should be a bridge from unemployment to work and from education to work. It should not be about creating a welfare lifestyle, which concept has been bandied about considerably. We are reaching the point at which we need an information campaign in the media about the purpose of social welfare. Everybody understood the idea of Saorview but I am not so sure they understand the principle behind social welfare.

Given the size of the budget, social welfare should be about fairness. We are all trying to achieve this. It is a question of giving people a hand up and of poverty-proofing. It is about payments that are earned in the form of pensions or received by virtue of genuine circumstances. I include the carer's grant and child benefit.

Our approach must include the cutting out of fraud. Fraud hurts everyone, including the worker paying the taxes. It creates great hostility and hurts the genuinely needy. These are some of the issues on which I want to touch in my contribution.

I wish to refer to the activation measures in the budget and the important bridge from unemployment or education to employment. I compliment the Minister on the 10,000 additional places this year and particularly on her innovative local authority social employment scheme. When I examined the figures, I noted the Department is spending ¤1 billion on activation measures. Given that our mission is to get people back to work, this is not enough. We should be spending more in this area. As the Minister stated, doing so would constitute a social welfare investment in people's futures, particularly the futures of those who are jobless.

The most recent ESRI report, to which the Minister referred, shows that 22% of the population are in jobless families, which is twice the European average. This is a damning figure. Joblessness is not good for families. This is particularly the case for children, who need to see purposeful activity and their parents going to work.

When I am on the doorsteps, I am frequently asked why the welfare system does not require people to be more active. I recall Fr. Sean Healy making a proposal over a year ago that people should work for their welfare at a rate that one's job would command if one were employed. There is considerable dignity and purpose associated with such a practice. One would be out and about and more likely to network and pick up work.

There is a Twitter feed called @EireJobs, available at twitter.com/eirejobs, on which approximately 200 jobs per week are advertised. Has analysis been done to demonstrate that the jobs that are becoming available now require the skills of those who are claiming unemployment benefit at present? Is there a skills match or mismatch?

A Nobel laureate, Professor Christopher Pissarides, spoke in the House recently about the importance of retraining and education. It is on this subject that I applaud the Minister regarding child care places. Obviously, young women and young mothers cannot go back to work unless there are child care places. Professor Pissarides spoke strongly about the need to ensure the unemployed are ready to return to work and that there is retraining. He also spoke about the need for young people to be flexible and try many jobs until they find the one that suits them. The education system should be preparing them for this. There needs to be a tie-in with the education system in this regard.

Professor Pissarides spoke about how policies should not restrict labour turnover. He highly recommended job subsidies, stating that job subsidies that offer work experience are better than unconditional unemployment compensation. Rather than giving jobseeker's allowance, it is better to invest the money in initiatives such as Tús, JobBridge, internships and employment schemes. Sweden, for example, has a very successful scheme that subsidises the hiring of unemployed workers to replace those on maternity leave and other types of leave.

The authorities can pass on the unemployment compensation to the employer who then pays an extra portion that is higher than the compensation. Everyone wins in that case. The employer and the employee are paying PRSI, it is cheaper than supporting unemployment through transfers only, and the unemployed get work experience. German studies have found that works when a similar scheme was tried in that country.

I will make another point on activation measures. For social welfare purposes the rates for jobseekers on casual work should be calculated by hour rather than whole day. That would also reduce their incentive to not work on certain days due to the social welfare rules. That is quite controversial but in countries such as Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, it is working well in that they do not have to leave a full day vacant to qualify for some social welfare.

In terms of what has happened since the budget was announced, we agree we must be fair and guard against poverty. That is the challenge but the question is the way we achieve it. Since the budget announcement the country and the Government have been rocked by two measures, namely, the cut in the carer's grant and child benefit. I have reflected on that. The Minister's hands are tied. She had to take ¤390 million out of this budget, and that was after a very good negotiation to reduce it from ¤510 million. The construct within which the negotiations are taking place appears to be wrong. It is time that the programme for Government was renegotiated-----