Written answers

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Department of Social and Family Affairs

Social Welfare Code

9:00 pm

Photo of Willie PenroseWillie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour)
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Question 161: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs the way her Department has stress-tested the impact of each of the measures announced in Budget 2009 on individual social welfare recipients and particular sub-groups; and if she is satisfied that the net effect of Budget 2009 will not be an increase in poverty levels among certain groups. [35628/08]

Photo of Mary HanafinMary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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The social welfare related measures in Budget 2009 were subjected to a Poverty Impact Assessment in accordance with guidelines issued by the Office for Social Inclusion in March of this year.

Poverty Impact Assessment is the process by which government departments, local authorities and State Agencies assess policies and programmes at design, implementation and review stages in relation to the likely impact that they will have, or have had, on poverty and on inequalities which are likely to lead to poverty, with a view to poverty reduction.

The ESRI's SWITCH model was used to measure the impact of the proposed changes on actual household incomes. This analysis concluded the following:

The increase is progressive in terms of its distributional impact: 52% of the change in disposable income resulting from the social welfare Budget proposals will go to those in the bottom three deciles, while 79% will go to the bottom half of the income distribution; and

The proposals will result in a fall of 0.59 and 1.20 percentage points respectively in the numbers below 50% and 60% of median equivalised disposable income.

Actual changes in both the 'at risk of poverty' and 'consistent poverty' rates during 2009 will not be known until the results of the EU-SILC survey for that year are available, which is likely to be in November 2010 approximately.

A separate Poverty Impact Assessment on the taxation proposals in the Budget was undertaken by the Department of Finance.

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