Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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323. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if consideration has been given to extending eligibility for the fuel allowance to include recipients of the part-time job incentive scheme reflecting the fact that recipients will have been in receipt of jobseeker's allowance for 15 months before moving to the part-time job incentive scheme and are restricted in the hours they can work whilst on the scheme; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [49349/21]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The Fuel Allowance is a payment of €28.00 per week for 28 weeks (a total of €784 each year) from October to April, to 370,000 low income households, at an estimated cost of €300 million in 2021. The purpose of this payment is to assist these households with their energy costs. The allowance represents a contribution towards the energy costs of a household. It is not intended to meet those costs in full. Only one allowance is paid per household.

Qualifying payments for fuel allowance are those payments that are considered long term payments and an applicant must also satisfy a means test.

The Part-Time Job Incentive Scheme (PTJI) is a scheme which allows persons who are long-term unemployed to take up part-time employment for less than 24 hours per week and receive a special weekly income supplement. PTJI is awarded for one year only but may be extended for up to 12 weeks in exceptional circumstances. Participants get a fixed weekly allowance which is paid regardless of how much a person earns and therefore it is not a means tested scheme

While a person on the PTJI scheme may only work up to 24 hours per week to receive their weekly supplement, one of the conditions for participating on the scheme is that a participant must be genuinely seeking work and available for full-time work while they are on PTJI so they should not refuse additional employment if available to them.

Any decision to extend the eligibility criteria for Fuel Allowance to include people participating on the PTJI Scheme would have to be considered in the context of overall budgetary negotiations.

I hope this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.