Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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11. To ask the Minister for Social Protection in view of the criticism of the changes to the one-parent family payment scheme by children's advocacy groups, if she will revise her plans to progress with the changes to the scheme, which will affect lone parents with children over seven years of age. [24828/15]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I welcome the considerable debate generated by this reform, which is long overdue. As I said earlier, despite committing extensive funding to lone parent payments since the 1970s, lone parents remain the most at-risk-of-poverty, and their children are at a high risk of poverty. For too long, significant numbers of lone parents have been typecast, and confined to social welfare dependency. The best route out of poverty and social exclusion is through paid employment. The purpose of the reform of the one parent family payment is to maximise the opportunities for lone parents to enter into and increase employment. The reforms seek to address the long-term social welfare dependency and poverty experienced by many lone parents by providing them with improved access to the Department’s range of education, training, and employment supports, such as back to education allowance, back to work enterprise allowance and community employment. In addition, I was pleased to introduce the back to work family dividend in the last Budget. This provides a significant incentive for families with children to move into employment, as recently reported by the ESRI.

Access to these services and supports is imperative for lone parents, in order to ensure that their prospects of securing employment and financial independence are improved.

Any reversal of these reforms would delay this critical interaction between lone parents and the Department’s Intreo services and would potentially increase the barriers they face to entering employment in the future.

I therefore have no plans to reverse the forthcoming changes to the one parent family payment.

However, I look forward to examining the various supports available to all families with children, including single parent families, in the next Budget. In particular, I will look at the scope for improvements in the child benefit, as well as other supports for families in part-time or full-time employment.