I thank Ms Thyne, Dr. Dunne and Ms Cox, and acknowledge the work that we have done collectively to advance this report. I welcome the opportunity to discuss it here today and thank the committee for the invitation to do so. We discussed it in the audiovisual room in June. Since then, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, has published a policy statement on care in which it approaches care in quite a broad sense, as we do as feminists, by insisting that care means both caring for people and caring about them, not as a burden but as a feature of our mutual interdependence and reciprocity. IHREC has very much chimed in with the recommendations of the report and has recommended very clearly in its report that we should establish a participation income. That builds also on proposals from the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, in its 2020 report entitled The Future of the Irish Social Welfare System: Participation and Protection. There is a body of analysis, research and advocacy working towards that. As Dr. Dunne mentioned, the context of the commissions on pensions, tax and welfare, Sláintecare, the citizens' assembly, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Gender Equality and the forthcoming referendum all speak to gender, care and family in various guises. We see this as part of that context of opening up this debate. Likewise, the report addresses Census 2022, which outlines the demographic changes that we are facing into and the shifts in dependency ratios that will put more pressure on society, families and communities, and particularly on women in relation to the care needs of a shifting demographic. Without policy shifts, that is likely to reinforce the gendered care inequalities that we see at the moment.
One thing I want to make really clear is that we are arguing for a very innovative and reimagined approach to welfare, but we also see the value in constructively building on existing welfare policy where it is useful and where it values care.
There are aspects where it does. There is the new pensions policy shift to carer's credits being augmented, the current policy of including a half-rate payment for eligible claimants to carer's allowance and a 1.5 social welfare payment for those caring for more than one person. We welcome those measures and build them into the proposal as we go forward. Generally, what we are highlighting - and we produce more evidence aligned with the personal testimonies of people like Ms Thyne - is the poor capacity of carer's allowance to recognise, value, reward and redistribute family-based care work. We are saying that we have really reached the ends of our capacity to use carer's allowance as an effective method to do that.
The research was trying to use a feminist methodology to examine what proposals we could develop to replace carer's allowance as a way of socially valuing family care work. Key to the feminist methodology is respecting and learning from different types of knowledge and really listening to the voice of people experiencing the issue in the research. It is also about making sure that we do not reinforce particular narrow care hierarchies, that we keep a broad definition of care, and that we are very mindful that people are always active agents in their own lives. Most people give and receive care at some different dimension of their lives. In any kind of research, you do a literature review. We did that, looking at academic and policy literature, feminist literature on value and care, international comparisons of how care is valued and an analysis of social welfare approaches to valuing participation. We then conducted a round of qualitative interviews with unpaid family carers which tried to get at their experiences of trying to access the carer's allowance, some of whom were successful in accessing it, some of whom only accessed a limited amount due to means testing and some of whom did not access it at the end of the day because of the way the means test worked. We unearthed quite a lot of information there about the experience of carers trying to navigate a really complex and demeaning system. We developed a straw man proposal about a participation income that could replace the means-tested carer's allowance. We conducted a process called merging of knowledge, where we invited different stakeholders, including family carers, NGOs, civil servants involved in the policy design and implementation of carer's payments, academics and policy analysts, to engage with the straw man proposal, tear it apart and put it back together again. That informed us developing a fuller proposal for a participation income for family carers, which we then put a timeline on implementing. That is what we want to talk to the committee today.
The qualitative interviews really did highlight the personal and social impact of care, the low income people are living on, the dependence that they have on the welfare system, the devaluation, the exhaustion, the depletion of their resources, exactly as Ms Thyne has discussed, having to run down the meagre family resources in order to get to the bottom. They also highlighted the difficulty of navigating the bureaucracy and administration of the welfare system and carer's allowance, and how complicated, invasive and intrusive it is. The requirement of assessing family income was seen by many women, in particular, as not recognising their own independent need. The requirement for reassessment if there is any shift at all in the family income was seen as particularly soul-destroying. The amount of form-filling and repeated requests for the same information from different aspects of the State all added stress to the already-stressed lives of carers who are really fighting for survival a lot of the time.
Our sense, at the end of the qualitative research and from the literature review, is that care work and the role of the family in providing care is largely invisible in our understanding of how society and the economy works. We feel that if we could reimagine the welfare payment it would be a way of making that care work more visible and of giving us a different understanding of where care needs to sit in the policy system. The individual right to care income is a core part of that. Having an individual's right to the payment really does involve not going through a household-based means test. It involves having to engage with the question of whether there should be a means test right from the start.
In advancing the proposal, we looked to work already done in the academic literature on participation income, which is not a new idea. It was first brought into the literature in 1995 and is now quite mainstream as part of debates around income support. It is called a conditional universal income and the idea is that it will be more broadly accessible to people because there will not be a means test with it, but there will be conditions about who can get it based on their care obligations and the care work that they are doing.
It is not a free-for-all in terms of the means test being taken away and it being opened to a wide range of people. There would still be a stringent level of conditions that would narrow the range of people able to access it. There are various ways of designing it. There are nuanced trade-offs between the adequacy, breadth and depth of the payments and those trade-offs in the design will ultimately determine the cost. When we drew up the straw man proposal, we got the participants in the merging of knowledge process to consider issues such as entitlement, eligibility, adequacy, how it would impact on gender equality, the principles of reciprocity and conditionality, political feasibility, institutional capacity to implement a new payment, which Department should do it and that type of thing. It was clear in discussing it that people recognised two things are also needed. First, there is a need for supportive institutions. Much of the social isolation of carers and those being cared for relates to a need for an underlaying support network of institutions to break the social isolation and give them support, but also services. It came out loud and clear that no matter what kind of income support a person has, if it is not accompanied and complemented by an adequate provision of services in respect of health and social support needs, it will never be adequate. The idea of services being the primary mechanism of meeting people's care needs is important.
The merging of knowledge exercise allowed us to advance the proposal for the payment to a more definitive range but we recognised we were not in a position to do full equality proofing and impact assess the proposal more fully. We were, however, able to get the proposal to a stage where we could get basic costings on it. The costings are important in this context. The Parliamentary Budget Office carried out analysis in respect of the maintenance of an income support such as a participation income but the retention of some level of an income test in order to preclude its availability to relatively wealthy families. We costed €100,000 as an example of a quite high income threshold that would rule out the payment being available to those families deemed to be relatively well-off and found there was only a €10 million difference in the costing between that scenario and completely abolishing the means test. Completely abolishing the means test at a cost of €10 million gives savings in administrative cost and a plethora of advantages in terms of knocking out the demeaning form-filling, assessment and reassessment procedures and all the things families were saying were soul-destroying. For only €10 million, one gets a significant amount of worth in terms of the advancement of a universal payment. At the rate of carer's allowance that was in place before the budget announcement yesterday, the costing we had for that universal payment was €397 million, which is relatively affordable in the context of the overall budget announcement, for example. The dynamic costs might include behavioural changes, such as people adjusting their behaviour in the labour market or their caring activity should the payment change. We were not able to estimate those costs. We were only able to do a static costing based on the information we and the Parliamentary Budget Office had at the time. More work would need to be done at implementation and design stage but, right now, we can confidently state that switching the present carer's allowance from a means-tested payment to a universal payment and maintaining the same range of rules and conditions with regard to eligibility from a care perspective would cost €397 million and it would be very good value for money to do that. It would effect a range of possibilities and very usefully open up the way we can support care.
In saying that, we had four main recommendations. The obvious one is that maintaining the good features in current carer policy but primarily abolishing the means test on carer's allowance would enable us to reimagine a different approach. It is clear the adequacy of that payment is an issue. Recommending it at the present payment means recommending a relatively inadequate payment, as the Cathaoirleach stated. We note, however, that the Commission on Taxation and Welfare recommended a benchmarking and indexation income adequacy process and we believe that is the place for the adequacy issue of the future of participation income for family carer's payment. In the context of our recommendations, many of the issues relevant to form-filling, assessments, the soul-destroying process and the difficulty in navigating the payment will remain if we adopt the main procedures used to assess eligibility for carer's allowance.
There is a need to take a hard look at the navigational issues people experience in working through the process of determining eligibility based on medical and care needs, rather than on the money eligibility, which we argue would be gone. A navigation working group is needed to finesse and iron out some of those issues but the overall issue should be advanced by an implementation group reporting to a Cabinet committee on social inclusion. We recognise that in the budget yesterday, a group incorporating the Departments of Social Protection and Health was announced to look at issues relating to the means testing of carer's allowance. We see that very much as the potential implementation group we recommended in the research. We argued in the research that the group should advance with the principles of merging of knowledge and co-production, where the voice and experience of carers, NGOs working with carers, academics who have studied the issue or carried out policy analysis and civil servants implementing it would be involved in the design and implementation. The process should be rich in terms of taking into account the issues for implementation. The timeline for that implementation should begin now. We are pleased the group is to be set up before the end of the year. The payment could be administered by the Department of Social Protection but the ownership of the issue is a health and care issue, rather than an income support one, and probably should be with the Department of Health. The interagency approach is necessary, however, as is a whole-of-government approach. We welcome that the committee is a joint process and recognises that whole-of-government approach. The Cabinet subcommittee for social inclusion is the place to report to and advance the proposal.
By way of conclusion, this is a small piece of research, limited in scale and scope by the amount of funding that was available. As academics, we engaged on a pro bono basis. The research assistant was paid. The funding for the research from the IHREC was very welcome. We are proud to be associated with the research. We see it as a key mechanism to advance a fundamental shift in how we value the issue of care in families and communities. It has great potential but, as the Cathaoirleach stated, it needs to be fleshed out, go into an implementation process and be unpacked. That is why we are here. We want to unpack it now in order to help advance it to the next stage.
