Written answers

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

Department of Social Protection

Departmental Expenditure

Photo of John BradyJohn Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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310. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the estimated cost of reducing the numbers of hours worked required to access family income support from 19 to 15. [14669/16]

Photo of Leo VaradkarLeo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The Family Income Supplement (FIS) is an in-work support for employees with families on low earnings, who otherwise might be at risk of financial poverty. The estimated expenditure for 2016 is expected to be €410 million.

To qualify for payment of FIS, a person must be engaged in full-time insurable employment which is expected to last for at least 3 months and be working for a minimum of 38 hours per fortnight or 19 hours per week. Furthermore, the average family income must be below a specified amount which varies according to the number of qualified children in the family.

The “hours worked” eligibility criterion has been reduced significantly since the introduction of the scheme in 1984, from 30 hours per week to 19 hours per week in 1996. Further reducing the “hours worked” requirement would have potentially significant expenditure implications.

For low income workers with less than the minimum hours of employment for FIS and working on a casual basis up to and including 3 days per week, jobseeker's schemes provide in-work income support through daily disregards and tapered withdrawal of payments.

The current number of families who are working between 15-18 hours and are earning below the relevant FIS thresholds is currently unknown.

Reducing the numbers of hours worked required to access FIS from 19 to 15 could have a number of behavioural effects including: reduce incentive to increase part-time hours; result in recipients on the minimum 19 hours threshold reducing their hours of work; and reduction in the "hours worked" criteria might attract new recipients currently on higher wages above the FIS threshold, who might decide to reduce their hours in order to qualify.

Under EU regulations FIS is defined as a family benefit and is exportable in cases where the claimant is working in Ireland but where the children are living abroad. My Department hasno way of predicting with any degree of accuracy the potential in-flow from this category.

Therefore, my Department has no way of accurately estimating the cost of reducing the numbers of hours worked required to access FIS from 19 to 15 hours.

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