The purpose of this Bill is to bring about certain amendments in the Unemployment Assistance Act which circumstances have shown to be necessary. In the first place, it is desired to establish machinery which will enable applicants, who are dissatisfied with the assessment of their means by unemployment assistance officers, to have their appeals considered and determined expeditiously. An applicant who has been refused a qualification certificate, or who disagrees with the valuation of his means made by the unemployment assistance officer, has, under the Principal Act, a right of appeal to the Appeals Committee, which Committee sits in Dublin and consists of officers from the Department of Finance, the Department of Industry and Commerce, and the Department of Local Government and Public Health. That machinery would be quite adequate in normal circumstances, but, in the year in which the Act came into operation, a large number of cases were refused, for one reason or another, and an equally large number of persons were dissatisfied with the assessment of their means, and, in all such cases, the right of appeal was exercised, with the result that some 35,000 appeals were made and the machinery available was totally inadequate to deal with them. Certain temporary measures were adopted to try to ease that situation, but it has been found necessary to set up a new method of determining these appeals. The method proposed here is the appointment of appeal officers who will come in between the unemployment assistance officer and the Appeals Committee with the right to determine finally the appeal of any applicant, but also with the right to pass on the appeal of the Appeals Committee if, in the opinion of the appeals officer, any question of general principle arises to be considered. In any event, the determinations made by the appeals officers will be based upon the decisions of the Appeals Committee, so that there will be uniformity in the application of the law.
Another amendment which it is desired to effect is one designed to enable any person who has been receiving unemployment assistance to get work, not exceeding six weeks in duration, without interrupting the continuity of his claim to assistance. At the present time, a person who receives two days' employment, interrupting two periods of unemployment of not less than two days, is deemed to be continuously unemployed and does not have to undergo the waiting period of a week before again receiving unemployment assistance, but if such a person gets three or four days' work, or any period in excess of two days, then, in order to be entitled to receive unemployment assistance he has, under the present Act, to wait for a certain period before getting assistance. That has operated in the way of deterring such a man from taking short periods of employment as they offered. Under the new arrangement, persons receiving unemployment assistance will be allowed to take work up to six weeks in duration without losing unemployment assistance except for the days upon which they were actually employed. Although that change may, by itself, increase the cost of unemployment assistance to some extent, we hope that its effect in encouraging people to seek for and obtain short periods of work that may be available will have a counteracting effect. Furthermore, it is intended to allow persons to draw unemployment assistance or unemployment insurance benefit to which they may be entitled, at their own discretion. Ordinarily, of course, if the amount of benefit to which the persons concerned are entitled is considerable, they will draw it because it is paid at considerably higher rates, but as the former Act stands at the present moment, if the person concerned does some work and gets, let us say, one insurance stamp placed to his credit, he is in an unfortunate position because he has to wait one week to get his insurance benefit, and then has to wait another week before he gets his unemployment assistance benefit. That also operated to deter workers from taking short periods of employment. By allowing them to draw unemployment assistance, if they so choose, we get over that deterrent. We avoid the necessity for a second waiting week and we allow the worker to accumulate these occasional insurance stamps which he may be able to get until they are of a sufficient number to make it worth his while to claim benefit on them.
Another one of the major changes which it is proposed to effect arises under Section 11. At the present time, when a person's means are assessed, the total of the determined weekly value of the means is stated in his qualification certificate, and when he becomes entitled to unemployment assistance he gets the scheduled rate of assistance less the amount of means, stated in his certificate, plus 2/-. In other words, 2/- of the means assessed are not calculated. There is a margin, under the existing Act, allowed, which was intended originally to provide a certain elasticity, or a certain margin for error of 2/-, and a person who has means amounting to 2/- in the week, or of any lesser sum, is entitled to unemployment assistance at the full rate. That means that such a person, with means calculated at 2/- a week, is, in a sense, better off than a person with no means at all and who gets the same amount of assistance. In any case, it was considered that the margin allowed was too wide and that a smaller margin would serve the purpose for which the section in the original Act was designed to serve. It is true that there is a substantially wider margin of uncalculated means under the Widows' and Orphans' Pensions Bill and the Old Age Pensions Act, but in this legislation we think it is desirable that we should eliminate items of cost of that kind. The main principle of the legislation is to provide assistance at the rates set out in the Princical Act, to persons who, during unemployment, are temporarily unable to provide for themselves. The individual amounts which can be made available will depend on the success of the Department in eliminating non-essential items of cost. We have contemplated the abolition of uncalculated means altogether, but we decided that it would be unwise to do so at this stage because there is a certain amount of uncertainty in the calculation of means, and the total abolition of that margin could not be considered until, at least, the arrears of appeals have been wiped out and all the cases that gave rise to appeals have been recorded and an examination made of the different factors that produced disagreement, whereever there is a disagreement, between the unemployment assistance officer on the one hand and the Appeals Committee on the other hand.
The other changes proposed to be effected are not of such importance. We are proposing to include, as dependents of their parents, invalid sons and daughters over 18 years of age. The purpose of that is to correct a certain error in the original Act. In the original Act a person can claim, as dependents, invalid sisters and brothers who are maintained by him, but he is not allowed to claim for his own sons or daughters, even if, through invalidity, they are unable to provide for themselves. The whole section is being repealed, and being re-enacted in a slightly different form: first, to effect that change, and, secondly, to get uniformity in the terms in which dependency is defined. There are three or four different expressions used in the Principal Act. They are all being changed in this Bill to the term "wholly or mainly supported by." Furthermore, the section, in its new form, excludes from the list of dependents the wife of an applicant for assistance where the wife has a pension or private means capable of supporting herself. That also is to correct a mistake in the preparation of the original Act.
Senators are aware that different rates of assistance are payable in different areas. The rate in the county boroughs and in the borough of Dun Laoghaire is higher than the rate in urban areas having a population in excess of 7,000 and, in those areas, it is higher than the rate paid in the rest of the Saorstát. As the original Act stands, if the boundary of a county borough were extended—and there is, in fact, I think, a proposal to extend the boundary of the borough of Dun Laoghaire at the present time—or if in consequence of the census we take next year, a town at present below 7,000 population were to be revealed to be a town with a population in excess of 7,000, the position would be that persons in the area added to the county borough, and persons in those towns would not be entitled to unemployment assistance at all. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that they will become entitled to assistance at the rates applicable to the areas.
The other changes are of still lesser importance. There is provision whereby persons who obtain unemployment assistance by deliberately making false or misleading statements or by concealing material facts will not be permitted to retain such assistance. There is also a provision by which public assistance authorities can, in certain circumstances, recover excess relief paid by them. If a person holding a qualification certificate applies for unemployment assistance, and is held by the unemployment assistance officer to be disqualified on any of the grounds—that he is not unemployed; that he is not seeking work; that he is not available for work or any of the other reasons—that person has a right of appeal to the Court of Referees and if the court decides in his favour, he becomes entitled to unemployment assistance as from the date of his claim. In the meantime, however, he may have been assisted by the local authority and may have received home assistance for a period of some weeks. As it stands, he not merely gets that home assistance, but at the end of the period he gets a lump sum representing the arrears of unemployment assistance due to him. We are providing that out of that lump sum the home assistance authority can be recouped the amount of home assistance paid. The other changes are minor. Some are merely designed to bring the Unemployment Assistance Act into conformity with the Unemployment Insurance Acts for convenience of administration and others dealing with such minor matters as the definition of a day, certain changes designed to facilitate the determination of appeals, and other matters of that kind.
