I thank all of those Senators who have contributed, including Senators Lombard, Craughwell, Ardagh, Wall, Warfield, Burke, Boylan, Dolan, Buttimer, Kyne, Currie, Cummins, Murphy and Ahearn. The social protection system is designed, as we know, to help people and ensure there is a safety net and baseline of income support, and that nobody falls under. Like all Members of the House, I meet people regularly through my constituency work who absolutely depend on their weekly social welfare payment. We are coming to the …

We need to consider the matter using an Oireachtas committee with which I am happy to engage and lend my support. However, it is important that the issue has cross-party support. Senators Ardagh, Warfield and Wall raised the issue of the pensions commission and the pension age. The pensions commission has been set up and is comprised of 11 very capable people from various backgrounds, particularly employer groups, business groups and pension experts. The commission has met three times. It has a huge body of work to…

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." As Deputies will be aware, the purpose of the Bill is to give legislative effect to the changes announced on budget day. The Estimates for the Department of Social Protection in 2021 is €25.1 billion. This is more than €4 billion larger than the Department's budget day allocation for 2020. Much of that additional spending will be required to meet the ongoing costs of the PUP and other jobseeker payments and supports. I am pleased, even in these difficult times, to …

I am happy to respond. How much time do I have?

I will try to answer as many questions, and there were many, as best I can and if I have not answered on some issues I may be able to address them on Committee Stage. I thank the Deputies for their contributions on the Bill. In response to Deputy Mattie McGrath, between last week and this week we will pay out €500 million in payments. Like the Deputy, I have been encouraging people to shop local because it is important that this money is spent in the local economy. It should help businesses the length and breadth o…

I am happy to accept amendment No. 3 from Deputies Joan Collins and Kerrane. We do not want self-employed people to turn down work for fear that it might impact on their pandemic unemployment payment. From my engagement with musicians and artists, they have said that €960 over eight weeks would give them a bit more flexibility when it comes to taking up occasional gigs. On that basis, I am happy to accept the amendment. This is a self-declaration process. There is no application process. We are trusting people, if …

Assuming that the Deputies intended the amendment to have the effect of paying the grant in January instead of June, I would like to point out that the current date is well established. It is known to recipients of carers' payments and other new carers who wish to apply for the grant. It would not be possible, from an administrative point of view, to implement such a change by January 2021. The Covid adjusted unemployment rate is 21%. The Department paid the Christmas bonus this week and last week 287,000 people re…

I fully understand and recognise the significant role that carers play in our society. There is no doubt about that. The role of social protection is to provide a basic income. I have asked and I want to engage with the Oireachtas committee because we all need to sit down and have a look at this. The Department of Health also has a role to play. I provide a basic income but we need to talk to the Department of Health in order to pay some carers for the amount of work they do. It is not the number of hours that this…

First, the increase in the working family payment income threshold for a family with one, two, or three children in recent budgets is a targeted measure benefiting the majority of low-income families who are in receipt of the working family payment. As of June, this cohort represented 86% of all working family payment recipient households. The Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 contains a commitment to instituting a review of the earnings thresholds used to qualify for in-work income supports for families on lo…

Four. Okay. It is important to bear in mind that the threshold for a four-child family is still €834. That is significantly higher than the threshold for a one-child household, for example, which is €531. Therefore, we are trying to help those where the threshold kicks in earlier. I take on board the Deputy's point. The Roadmap for Social Inclusion commits to reviewing the income limits so we will be investigating that next year. The reason I did not answer the Deputy was that I ran out of time. Regarding the inter…

I did say I will review it this year and I made that very clear. The qualified child payment includes all children. It is not true that the budget does nothing for the children in question. They will all get the qualified child payment. I remind the Deputies that I have not forgotten the children. They will get support through the qualified child payment but I will consider the issue of the fourth child in the context of next year's budget.

The amendment asks for the provision of a number of reports and I will go through each one separately. The first point I will make is that my Department recently did two reports. One was on the impact of carbon tax on low-income families and the other was on the qualifying conditions for fuel allowance with specific reference to jobseeker's allowance and supplementary welfare allowance. Both reports were laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas and I can arrange to send the Deputies copies of both reports. Energy p…

I am not clear what the Deputy is asking. Many young people have obviously been impacted by the pandemic and have accessed the PUP. We will have an intensive programme to help them to get back to work, whether through upskilling, reskilling, job placement programmes or whatever. We want to try to get those people back to work as quickly as we can. I made the point that jobseekers under 25 years of age who have qualified children, those who were in the care of the HSE immediately before they turned 18 and those who …

I see now from where the Deputy is coming. As I said, the Government has set up the Commission on Pensions and has asked it to look at all of the matters mentioned in the amendment. The commission is doing its work and I do not think there would be any point in us starting to prepare a report. We will provide the commission with all of the supports that it needs to deliberate and look at all of these issues. That would be a better exercise so that we can provide the members of the commission with all the informatio…

I am happy to engage with the Deputy but putting a request for reports into legislation is probably not the best way to do things. I give the Deputy a commitment that I will engage on this matter and we will work with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul to look at it. The fuel allowance, as it stands, is to keep people out of poverty, not to pay the full cost of their fuel, which is obviously a problem. We need to look at it in its entirety, so we need to look at the retrofit programme and how people can improve the…

A comprehensive policy review of carer's allowance, including the means test, was prepared by my Department and laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas on 28 August 2019. I am happy to provide a copy of that. In addition, on 15 August last year, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform published a spending review of carer support. Among its key findings was that the carer's allowance accounted for 77% of total carer support spend. Given how little time has elapsed between the publication of these two in-dep…

Before I joined this Department, I had the same concerns some of the Deputies have raised. However, I have gone into this matter in great detail. JobPath is providing a service. It is only one part of the jigsaw. I have been in touch with local employment service providers and want to increase the local employment service's capacity by 50% from 20,000 people to 30,000. I also want to increase the number of officials in Intreo offices by a further 100 case officers so that they can deal with the workload. This is al…

I will continue to review it. It was only extended for one year and the service it provides will go out to tender at some stage during 2021. As I said, I will continue to look at it. We all want the same thing. We want good value for money and I am told the JobPath service, at an average cost of €800, is much cheaper than some of the other services we provide because they are done on a different system. In fairness, my Secretary General gave a full report at the Committee of Public Accounts. The other services cost…

I thank Deputies for their co-operation in passing the Social Welfare Bill 2020. This is my first Social Welfare Bill and it has been a pleasure to work with Deputies and I thank them for that.

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. In common with other jobseeker payments, such as jobseeker's benefit and allowance, the fundamental condition for receipt of the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, is that the person is available to work but cannot do so because suitable work is not available to them. Persons claiming the PUP will have been in employment immediately before claiming the benefit. This is seen as initial evidence satisfying the genuinely seeking work requirement. Once people are in payment, …