The Children's Allowances Bill, as the House probably knows, secured general approval in the Dáil and, so far as could be judged from expressions of opinion appearing in the newspapers, general approval throughout the country. In fact, so general was the approval given to the Bill in the other House that I felt it necessary to emphasise that the whole of the plan for the payment of children's allowances is not contained in this Bill. It is not our practice, as the House knows, in Bills designed to forward particular projects, to set out therein the particular tax proposals which will raise the funds to make these projects possible. Tax proposals are brought forward in finance measures and, as a necessary part of the plan for the payment of children's allowances in this State, it will be the duty of the Minister for Finance, at some stage, to propose the imposition of new taxes or the retention for a longer period of existing taxes to raise the money required for the payment of these benefits.
The estimated cost of the measure is £2,250,000 per year. £2,250,000 per year represents a very substantial addition to the expenditure of this State on social services. It is, in fact, an increase of 25 per cent., and I should like the House to consider this Bill with that figure in mind, because approval of this measure seems to me to convey acceptance of the idea that an increase of 25 per cent. in the total expenditure of the State on social services can best be devoted to the establishment of this new service rather than to any other purpose, either the expansion of the provision now made to deal with unemployment, old age or ill-health, or any other useful social purpose.
This measure aims to secure the mitigation of one cause of want operating in this community. There are, as Senators know, many causes of want— unemployment, ill-health, old age, the death of a bread-winner. Any one of these causes may produce want in many households and the State has, by various enactments, endeavoured to mitigate or remove want arising from these causes. Social surveys carried out elsewhere, and our own experience, have shown that there is another cause of want not associated with unemployment, ill-health or old age, and that is, the want which arises amongst large families where the standard wage or the average income capable of providing the necessaries of life for a small family or a family of average size is inadequate to meet the needs of a large family. It is to remove that cause of want that this Bill is designed. I will ask Senators to remember that that is the purpose of the Bill.
Suggestions have been made in the Dáil, and in various newspapers, that the scope of the Bill should be extended to achieve other purposes, but, apart from the fact that any extension of its scope would react also upon the cost of it, the view of the Government is that we should aim to achieve in this Bill the one purpose that we have in mind, and that is the elimination of want due to the inadequacy of a standard wage or an average income to provide for the needs of a large family. This Bill is designed to close the gap in the social services of this State which permits want arising from that cause.
In so far as the principle of the Bill has secured general acceptance, I assume it is not necessary to defend it at any length. I think the need for the measure has been recognised by everybody. In fact, most political parties, and a large number of individuals not associated with political parties have been vying with each other in claiming to be the authors of the idea which the Bill represents. It is clear, however, that the implementation of the idea offered, and will offer in the future, many practical difficulties. After the Government had decided that such a service was desirable and should be set up, we had to consider the subsidiary problems which arose, and the solutions which we devised for these problems are set out in the Bill.
There are children's allowances schemes of one kind or another operating in many countries. Some of them are contributory schemes; there are some confined to limited classes of population; in a few cases they are of the kind proposed here—that is to say, a State service, the entire costs of which are out of State funds. We considered the possibility of a contributory scheme and a scheme that would be partly contributory and partly non-contributory, such as the widows' and orphans' scheme. We decided in favour of a non-contributory scheme. A contributory scheme is one to which people must contribute and there is no practical means by which you can secure contributions regularly from persons other than those who are employed for wages.
As the House probably knows, almost 50 per cent. of our occupied population are not employed for wages; they work on their own as farmers, fishermen, blacksmiths, independent tradesmen, or in some other such capacity. It would be impracticable to devise any method of securing from such persons regular contributions to a service of this kind because, of course, the risk of a large family is not one which the average individual feels inclined to insure himself against, particularly after he passes a certain age and still remains unmarried. If we had a contributory scheme we would have to secure contributions from every individual, even from those who would never be likely to benefit under the Bill. On a non-contributory basis we have made the scheme applicable to every family, irrespective of whether the head of the family is a wage earner, an employer or an independent worker of any kind.
The Bill does not provide for a means test. It does not follow, of course, that everybody in the community will benefit equally from the enactment of the scheme. As I informed the Dáil, it is the intention of the Government to modify the allowance permitted under the income-tax code in respect of children of the class covered by this Bill, so that those who come within the income-tax paying class will not, in fact, benefit. It is not practicable to adjust the income-tax so as to recover the amount which will be paid in benefit in respect of children, no more than and no less than that amount; but, in so far as it can be done, the aim is to secure that these persons within the income-tax paying class will not benefit; they will lose an amount corresponding to the allowance payable under this Bill.
We decided against a means test for a number of reasons. I think it is desirable that we should avoid any possibility of making the payment of children's allowances to a family a badge of poverty. Apart from that, however, there is a practical reason why a means test should be avoided, if at all possible. It involves, as experience of other legislation teaches us, an inquisition into the income of families which claim to be qualified for the receipt of benefit.
Under the Old Age Pensions Act or the non-contributory widow's pension scheme, that inquisition is of a limited kind, but if we tried to apply a means test to this scheme we would necessarily have to take into account not merely income from a farm or other property, such as farm animals and the various things that are taken into account under the Old Age Pensions Act, but also income from earnings, and the practical difficulty of securing a precise calculation of income from earnings in respect of a future or past period will be obvious. The organisation of such an inquiry into the means of a family would involve a vast administrative machine which would be costly to operate. It is true to say that, taking into account the adjustment in the income-tax code which we contemplate, the additional amount which will have to be paid out in benefit by reason of the adoption of this scheme without a means test would not exceed, except perhaps by a very slight amount, the additional administrative costs that would be necessary if we decided to operate the scheme with the means test applying to it.
The allowances that will be payable under this Bill will be paid in addition to allowances payable under other social services. An unemployment assistance applicant, with children, gets a children's allowance at the present time. A widow with children, under the widows' and orphans' pensions scheme gets allowances in respect of these children. These allowances will be paid in addition to other allowances. Some people have objected to that as piecemeal legislation. I considered the practicability and advisability of combining all the children's allowances, paid under the various social services, in one comprehensive scheme, and I found that the advantages that would be obtained would be slight, while the administrative problems that were involved would be in no way minimised. In fact, the examination which I gave to the matter seemed to indicate that the simplest procedure, one which would involve the least difficulty for individuals applying under any of these schemes and the least amount of administrative reorganisation, as well as the least cost, was to proceed as we are proposing to do here, and to make these allowances payable, supplementary to all other allowances or all other forms of income.
The rate proposed here is 2/6 per week, payable in respect of each child, under 16 years of age, in excess of two. In various other countries where they have a children's allowances scheme, the practice is to pay the allowances in respect of children in excess of two. In some countries they pay allowances in respect of all children in excess of one, and in a large number of cases they pay them only in respect of children in excess of three. As, however, the aim of the Bill was to provide an addition to the income of large families, and as the average family in this State consists of a father, mother, and two children, we decided that the allowances should be paid in respect of children in excess of two. It will be appreciated that the aim of the Government was to make the best use of the total sum of money which is being made available for this service. We could, of course, pay a smaller sum per child to a larger number of children, or a larger sum per child to a smaller number of children; but it was considered that the best method of securing the aim we had in mind, within a limit of £2,250,000, was to make a payment of 2/6 per week in respect of all children, in excess of two, under 16 years of age. The increase in the cost of the scheme, if the payments were to be made in respect of children in excess of one, would be another £1,250,000, bringing the total cost up to £3,500,000; whereas, if we were to pay the allowance in respect of all children under 16 years of age, the total cost would be £5,250,000. It will be appreciated that there are very substantial jumps in the cost of the scheme, according as the number of children brought under it is increased, and, of course, in every family where there are children there is the first child, in a large number of families there will be a second child, and in only a small number of families will there be a third child. So that, the extension to cover children in excess of one, or to cover all children, would add very considerably to the cost of the scheme.
It is proposed that payment will be made by means of vouchers which will be given to the head of the family, once in every six months. We had a discussion in the Dáil as to whether the allowances should be paid to the father or the mother. It was contended by some Deputies that the allowances should be paid to the mother. I think myself that the would be an undesirable principle to establish. We are proposing here to make an addition to the family income. That is the primary purpose of the Bill, and the obvious person to whom to give the allowances is the provider of the family income who, in most cases, is the male parent. We do, however, arrange in the Bill for the possibility of the male parent nominating the mother as the recipient of the allowances, and there are necessary provisions to deal with cases where the father or the mother might be mentally or otherwise unsuitable for the receipt of the allowance. Normally the intention is to make the allowance payable to the male parent, if living, and to make it in the form of a book of vouchers representing the payments to which he is entitled over a period of six months. That involves that the circumstances of each family will be reviewed once in every six months. The intention is that once in every six months the number of qualified children in the family will be ascertained and, on the basis of that determination, the allowances will be paid for a six-monthly period, irrespective of changes which will take place in the family. If a child died in the meantime, or had passed over the age of 16, or had gone to live with some other household, the allowances would still be paid upon the basis determined on the appropriate date. Similarly, if a new child should be born into the family, or if there should be an addition in some other way to the number of children in the household, the benefit of the increased allowance would not accrue to that household until the next date after the circumstances of the family are ascertained.
That simplifies the problem of verifying the amount which each household is entitled to receive. It might be possible to arrange for an immediate variation of the amount payable according as changes in the number of children occur in a household, but the machinery of investigation, and the arrangements for payment which would be necessitated by such a decision, would be very elaborate indeed. Under this system, while admitting the possibility that some people would be getting more for a period than they were entitled to, whereas others might be getting less than they were entitled to during that period, we can nevertheless make payments on a definite basis by a simple administrative arrangement, and we can secure that the family can continue to draw the allowances irrespective of alterations in their circumstances, and without recourse to the administrative machine, during the payment period. The book of vouchers will be dispatched to the head of the household. Each voucher will be for the weekly amount, and the persons concerned can draw the money by cashing these vouchers at the money order post offices. They can, if they wish, allow these vouchers to accumulate for a period not exceeding three months, and can cash them all together. Halfway through the book there will be a form which the head of the household will have to fill in, in order to receive his allowance, if he is entitled to receive it, during the following six-monthly period.
So far as the text of the Bill is concerned, may I say that these arrangements do not appear. The Bill sets out the general scheme to be operated, and leaves to be fixed by regulation these various matters, such as the method of payment, the form of the voucher, the means of checking the accuracy of claims, and so forth. It will be obvious that in bringing into operation any scheme of this kind it is necessary to have considerable elasticity. We could not now frame a whole series of regulations for covering all these matters and put them in the Bill, hoping that experience would not show that some of them would have to be modified.
If we had them in the Bill, modification of the regulations would require amending legislation—a slow procedure which would delay bringing the Bill into operation. We have, therefore, provided for the making of regulations to cover the details of the scheme and there is in the Bill, as Senators will notice, a general section similar to sections which have appeared in all corresponding measures which gives the Minister in charge of the Bill power, within a period of 12 months after the passing of the Bill, to make regulations modifying it in so far as such modification is necessary to bring it into operation. The most difficult period in the operation of a scheme of this kind is the beginning. Once you have got it established it more or less runs itself. The commencement is the period of possible break-down, and in so far as it is a service of which we have no previous experience, it is not possible to forecast with any accuracy what the problems are likely to be.
One other matter I should perhaps refer to. The Bill, as Senators will have noted, provides for the division of the country into regions. There is no idea behind that regional administration other than simplification of the administrative problem. I have mentioned that we contemplate a bi-annual review of family circumstances and the issue of payment vouchers to qualified families. Clearly if we had the same qualifying date for the whole country, a vast amount of administrative work would arise to be done within a very short period and then, during the rest of the period, a very small amount of administrative work would become necessary. That would make impossible the employment of permanent staffs. You would have only a small nucleus of permanent staff and a large number of temporary staff employed to do the temporary work. That would not be a satisfactory arrangement. We have endeavoured to get out of that difficulty by dividing the country into three regions with the intention of having a different qualifying date for each region, so that one-third of the work will arise from each region at a different period.
The division of the country into regions will not affect in any way, except in very unusual cases, the amounts which persons will receive. We intend to have the same commencement date for the scheme for the whole country. Because of the division of the country into regions, we have to provide in the Bill for the possibility of people changing from one region to another. There may be individual cases, because of people moving from one region to another, where such people will get either a higher rate for a longer period or a lower rate for a shorter period, than they would receive if they had remained in the one region during the whole period; but that problem will only arise in the early stages of the operation of the measure. Once the scheme is in operation, payment will be made on the basis of their entitlement during every recurring period of six months. I do not know that there are any other matters which it would be necessary for me to mention at this stage. I recommend the Bill to the Seanad, and I feel sure that the Seanad, like the Dáil, will welcome the principle of it. Senators may have some suggestions to make as to its administration, but I would ask them, in making these suggestions, to bear in mind that the total expenditure which the Government contemplates on this measure is the £2,250,000 which I have already mentioned. While it might be too much to hope for suggestions that would reduce the cost, any suggestions made should aim in that direction rather than in the other.
