Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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Expenditure on the One Parent Family Payment (OFP) scheme is estimated to be €607million in 2015 with almost 70,000 recipients.

However, 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.

Child care policy, including the delivery and/or expansion of child care services, is the responsibility of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (D/CYA).

The reforms to the one-parent family payment have highlighted the need for child care supports to be available for lone parents who make the transition into employment. With this in mind I introduced the jobseeker’s transitional payment in 2013. This is available to OFP customers who transition from the OFP scheme onto a Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA) payment and who have a youngest child aged under 14 years. These customers are exempt from the JA conditions that require them to be available for, and genuinely seeking full-time employment, which would have been difficult for lone parents with young children to adhere to. The jobseeker’s transitional payment allows this cohort of customers to balance their caring responsibilities and significantly reduces their requirement for child care, while allowing them to work part time should they so wish. Through the jobseeker’s transitional payment, I have provided lone parents with children aged between seven and 13 years with a very long transition period of seven years within which to engage with the Department’s Intreo service to become job ready and find sustainable employment.

My Department in conjunction with the D/CYA, introduced the after-school child care scheme and the community employment childcare programme in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Both of these schemes were funded by my Department from savings from the child benefit scheme and build on the 25,000 subsidised childcare places provided by the D/CYA each year.

In Budget 2015, I introduced increases to the child benefit rate, the partial restoration of the Christmas bonus, as well as the back to work family dividend, all of which provide additional financial assistance to parents.

The Department of Children and Youth Affairs has also established a group at senior inter-Departmental level to carry out an economic and cost-benefit analysis of policies and future options for increasing the supply, accessibility, and affordability of quality child care, including early years and after-school child care. It is intended that the group will finalise its work in the summer of 2015.