Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Social Welfare Bill provides the legislative framework for the implementation of the measures announced in budget 2017. It also contains a number of largely technical changes which aim to resolve minor deficiencies identified within the welfare code. Overall, the Bill represents a prudent approach with modest increases to all weekly payments, alongside more targeted measures, an inclusive approach to ensure the recovery benefits everyone and that no one is left behind, a progressive approach to making work pay, including positive reforms to the social insurance system and the extension of access to benefits to the self-employed, and a targeted approach with measures to assist lone parents, low-income farm families and school children.

The Bill provides that the maximum rate of all weekly benefits will increase by €5 so that all people of working age, as well as retired people aged 66 or older, will see an improvement in their weekly incomes. Overall, almost 1.5 million people will benefit from these increases while local communities and businesses will benefit, in turn, from increased spending. Increases for recipients aged 66 years and over will come into effect during the week ending 10 March 2017. This includes, for instance, all those in receipt of the contributory State pension and the non-contributory State pension.The effect of this increase is to bring aggregate payments to pensioners back up to the level they had reached before the financial crisis in 2009 even taking into account the reductions in the telephone allowance and fuel allowance. I want to build on this progress in future budgets by continuing to increase the State pension at a rate greater than the rate of inflation.

The increases for other recipients will come into effect during the week following 10 March. Approximately 840,000 working age people will gain from this increase, regardless of whether they are jobseekers, widows and widowers, ill or disabled, lone parents, farmers, carers or participants in schemes such as community employment, Tús and the rural social scheme. Until budget 2017 was announced, none of these people had seen an increase in their weekly income since the cutbacks of 2010 and 2011. Even after the €5 increase next March, they will still be some €11.50 per week worse off than 2011 so I also plan to continue to increase these rates above the rate of inflation in future budgets. It was very important to me, and to all of my colleagues in Government, that no one was left out as we sought to extend the benefits of the economic recovery to all sectors of society. A social impact assessment of the social welfare budget package using the ESRI SWITCH model on a non-indexed basis found that people who are in lowest income quintile, the bottom 20%, gain the most from budget 2017.

This Bill is notable for its reformist approach in extending access to social insurance benefits to self-employed people. I am a strong supporter of the contributory principle, which is the idea that people who pay into the system should benefit from it. The social insurance system is an excellent example of how this principle can be realised. I am particularly pleased that this Bill includes a number of measures which will have a very positive impact for the self-employed, a sector which is critical to sustaining the Irish economy. As Senators are aware, the self-employed sector encompasses a huge range of people, including farmers, professionals, taxi drivers, hairdressers, small business owners, freelancers, tradesmen and tradeswomen and many more besides. They are people who face the same risks and contingencies in the course of their working lives as employees. To date, their PRSI contributions have allowed them to qualify for a State pension contributory on reaching pension age, maternity and paternity benefits but provide no safety net in other scenarios such as illness or unemployment.

Section 9 of the Bill provides that from March 2017, the self-employed will be entitled to access the optical, dental and hearing benefits currently available to employees under the treatment benefit scheme. This section of the Bill also provides that when the range of optical and dental treatments is expanded from October of next year, both employees and the self-employed will benefit equally. Section 4 of the Bill provides that the self-employed will be entitled to apply for invalidity pension with effect from December 2017. Where a self-employed person is no longer able to continue to work because of long-term ill-health or injury, they will have access to the safety net of State income support without a means test. They will no longer be asked about their assets or savings or their partner's income as that will no longer be relevant.