Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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272. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the estimated full-year cost of allowing lone parents in employment whose children are aged 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; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [21583/17]

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. These customers are exempt from the jobseeker’s allowance conditions that require them to be available for, and genuinely seeking, full-time work.

While it is a condition of the JST scheme that recipients must continue to parent alone, this is not a qualifying condition of the family income supplement (FIS) and so this information is not maintained for FIS recipients. From the data currently available on household composition within the FIS scheme, it is not possible to determine which FIS recipients, who are also lone parents, would satisfy the eligibility criteria to qualify for a JST payment. It is therefore not possible to provide an accurate costing of extending the payment of FIS to JST recipients.

Budget 2017 contained several measures which benefited JST recipients. These included the 85% Christmas Bonus, which was paid to JST recipients in early December 2016 and the increase in the weekly earnings disregard for JST recipients from €90 to €110. This increase came into effect in early January 2017. JST recipients also benefited from the €5 weekly increase in social welfare payments which came into effect in March 2017.