Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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822. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the cost to the Exchequer if eligibility criteria were altered to allow lone parents in employment whose children are between seven and 14 years of age to receive both the jobseeker's transition payment and family income supplement if they meet the qualifying criteria. [26341/16]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The jobseeker’s transitional payment (JST) is available to lone parents (both former one-parent family payment recipients and new lone parents), who have a youngest child aged 7 to 13 years inclusive. JST provides a more generous means test than Jobseeker’s Allowance, allows recipients to work any pattern thereby reducing their requirement for childcare, provides one to one access to an Intreo case office for up to 7 years with associated activation supports and allows recipients to participate in any form of education, while retaining income support.

While it is a condition of the JST scheme that recipients must continue to parent alone, this is not a qualifying condition of FIS and so this information is not maintained for FIS recipients. From the data available on household composition within the FIS scheme, it is not possible to determine which FIS recipients, who are also lone parents, would be eligible for JST, given the specific conditionality, which applies to the JST scheme.

It is worth noting that where a lone parent is currently on JST, increases their hours to at least 19 per week or 38 per fortnight they can transfer from JST to FIS. FIS provides very significant income support especially to lone parents. For instance a lone parent with one child who works 19 hours at the National Minimum Wage will receive a weekly FIS payment of €202. When combined with their earnings this lone parent has a weekly income of approximately €375, which is in excess of the threshold for at risk of poverty. This means that FIS is very successful at lifting lone parents out of poverty.