Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 14 Nov 1984

Vol. 106 No. 1

Adjournment Matter. - Christmas Welfare Benefit Payments.

Mrs. Robinson

My purpose in seeking to raise on the Adjournment the proposed double payment of benefits to certain categories of people this Christmas is to seek clarification as to the scope of this proposal. Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas were circulated with a press release issued by the Minister for Health, Deputy Desmond. I will refer to this press release. It is dated 25 October 1984 and it is in the following terms:

Barry Desmond, T.D., Minister for Social Welfare, announces that the Government have agreed to make a double payment in the week ending 7 December, 1984 to the following categories of people: old age and widow pensioners, contributory and non-contributory, retirement pensioners, invalidity pensioners, recipients of deserted wives' benefit and allowance, recipients of social assistance allowances for unmarried mothers, prisoners' wives and single women, those who receive occupational injuries benefits by way of pensions and persons in receipt of long term health payments, disabled persons maintenance allowance, infectious diseases maintenance allowance, blind welfare allowance and domiciliary care allowance for handicapped children.

The press release continues:

Altogether 414,000 recipients will benefit from this payment. The cost is £20.35 million. Some examples of the benefit are a contributory old age pensioner under 80 with an adult dependant will receive £156.10, a widow under 66 with two children in receipt of a contributory widow's pension will receive £135.80.

The announcement of double payments for certain categories of persons at Christmas is a very welcome one. It is a particularly welcome one at this time when there is great concern about the state of the economy and there was a question as to whether these payments would be made this Christmas. It is a very welcome decision, and it was one which was very heavily canvassed by the Labour Members of the Cabinet. What I want to raise and want to invite the Minister to respond to is the clarification of the scope of the proposal, because it is not entirely clear to me what that scope is. I very much welcome the presence of the Minister at this debate and I hope he will clarify the matter I raised.

I have been doing some homework on this proposal for double payment. It was first introduced by an Act of the Oireachtas in 1980 called the Social Welfare (Temporary Provisions) Act of 1980. It provided for double payment for certain categories of recipients of benefits and allowances. There was an Act in 1981, and then because a legislative change was made in the Social Welfare Act of 1982 it was possible in 1982 and 1983 to effect this provision for double payment by a statutory instrument. I understand that there will be a statutory instrument this year to effect the intention in this press release. It is very useful to raise this matter at this stage and to seek clarification on what would be the proposed scope of the statutory instrument.

My particular concern is that the list set out in this press release appears to miss certain categories of persons in receipt of benefits and allowances. I am concerned because these appear to be the categories which were omitted from the Act of 1980, the Act of 1981, from the statutory instrument of 1982 and from the statutory instrument of 1983. These categories — I may not have all of these categories, if not, the Minister might inform me of that —appear to be those on unemployment assistance, those on unemployment benefit and those on supplementary welfare allowance. I am very puzzled by this fact because those categories would be on lower levels of benefit or allowance than a number of the categories which are mentioned in the press release and which were included in the legislation on the statutory instruments in previous years.

On a point of clarification I will turn to the examples given in this press release. It refers to the fact that a contributory old age pensioner under 80 with an adult dependant will receive as a double payment at Christmas in the week ending 7 December 1984 the sum of £156.10. That is made up of the maximum personal rate for the contributory old age pensioner of £48.25 and the rate for the adult dependant of £30.80 giving a total of £79.05 which when doubled gives £158, not £156.10. That appears to be the amount. Similarly, in the case of the widow under 66 — the other example given — the maximum personal rate for the widow is £43.45 and the rate for the first child is £11.65, the rate for the second child is £12.80, giving a total for the week of £67.90 which when doubled gives the figure mentioned in the press release of £135.80.

If one looks at the other categories that I mentioned, for example, a person on unemployment assistance who would be in receipt of what is called long-term unemployment assistance. Again I am looking for clarification on this: I think it is correct that "long term" means where a person is in receipt for 15 months of unemployment assistance or where a person goes from unemployment benefit when the time has run out on to unemployment assistance and therefore these persons would be in receipt of the unemployment assistance allowance for that sustained period. Looking at the urban rate, the maximum personal urban rate for the long term, which is slightly higher than for the short term, would be £32.80. If you take a person on that with one adult and one child dependant it would come to a total of £64.60 or if one took a person in receipt of unemployment assistance with two child dependants, making a comparison with the contributory widow's pension, which is referred to in the press release, the contributory widows under 65 years of age with two children would be in receipt of the basic rate of £67.90 which would be doubled to £135.80. A person on unemployment assistance with two dependent children would be on £50.55. It does not appear that it would be envisaged that that person would receive a double payment at Christmas.

Similarly, for a person on unemployment benefit again the maximum rate is lower than the maximum rate for a number of the categories who are going to receive the double payment. A person on unemployment assistance would receive a maximum personal rate of £37.25 and with two dependant children that would come to £56.00. It appears that that person is not going to receive a double payment at Christmas. Another category which I mentioned appears to be omitted from the press release — unless I have either misread it or misunderstood it — is a person in receipt of supplementary welfare allowance, which of course would be the lowest maximum personal rate. The maximum personal rate is £29.95. If such a person was only in receipt of that and had two child dependants the total he would receive is £46.85.

These are the figures that we should compare because we are not really talking about statistics in this matter. We are talking about neighbours. We are talking about people living next door to each other. In one case, for people who are at a higher level it appears that Christmas means they are going to get a double payment in the week ending 7 December of this year. For the immediate neighbour who is in fact on a lower income, but in exactly the same family situation, they are not going to get a double payment at all. I do not understand if that is the case what the possible rationale could have been in 1980, 1981, 1982 or 1983. I certainly would not be happy that we would be drawing that kind of distinction going into Christmas of 1984. We do have to accept now — and this is an important political reality — that the double payment at Christmas has become a very important factor for a number of families; the greater the need the more important that double payment is. It is extremely welcome that even in the very difficult economic climate that we have this Government have ensured that double payments would be made this Christmas. It is equally of very great importance that we ensure that there is equity and fairness in the matter.

It is of particular importance in the area of the unemployment allowance because a distinction is drawn in the rates which are issued by the Department between short term and long term. We are talking about effectively long term benefits, although for some reason, which is not borne out by the reality of modern life, these allowances are characterised as being short term benefits. They are not short term when somebody is 15 months in receipt of unemployment assistance and then it is means-tested; it is a very low rate of benefit and yet these appear to be categories that will not be included in the double payment. I only want to ask for clarification on the matter. I hope I have completely misconstrued the press release and that the provision for doubling of payments will extend to the categories that I have identified, because they appear to me on the level of payments to these families to be the categories in greater need. Again — the Minister may correct me if I am mistaken in this — if one looks at some of the categories that are included, the old age and widow's contributory pension, I am delighted that people in that category would get a double payment at Christmas but they could be people who are not in the same kind of need, who are not on the same low level of subsistance as other families. We are talking about neighbours. We are talking about women with their children living next door to each other. We are talking about families trying to subsist in very difficult circumstances. It is extremely important that we stand back from something that we have become used to — this double payment at Christmas — and seek clarification on the rationale behind it and seek clarification in particular on the scope of this press release which is being issued to Members of the Houses. I would very much welcome clarification from the Minister.

Minister of State at the Department of Social Welfare (Mr. Pattison)

As announced on 25 October last the Government decided that a double payment will be made in the week ending 7 December 1984 to recipients of the following social welfare payments — old age pensions, retirement pensions, blind pensions, invalidity pensions, occupational injury pensions, payments for widows and orphans, deserted wives, unmarried mothers, single women and prisoners' wives. The double payment will also be made to recipients of the following health allowances — disabled persons' maintenance allowance, infectious diseases maintenance allowance, blind welfare allowance, domiciliary care allowance for handicapped children. These are the very same categories who benefited from a Christmas double payment in each of the last four years, that is 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1983. The method of payment is also the same as in previous years. The double payment will be made to the Post Office and the appropriate day of payment of pensions and allowances is the week ending 7 December. Old age, blind pension, widows' and orphans' pensions will be due on Friday, 7 December, the other categories on Thursday, 6 December. The amount of the extra payment will be equal to the face value of the weekly pensioner allowance order and will include all increases in respect of adult and child dependents and any supplements such as the living alone allowance which form part of the regular weekly payment. Certain long term recipients of occupational injury benefit by way of pension are paid by cheque monthly in advance. These will be issued with cheques at the equivalent of five weeks payment instead of four. Persons receiving health allowances will be paid the extra amounts by the health boards.

The number of persons who will benefit from the double payment totals 414,000. These are made up of 200,000 old age and blind pensions; 94,300 widows and orphans; 33,000 retirement pensioners; 23,000 invalidity pensioners; 8,000 deserted wives; 14,700 social assistance recipients; 7,000 occupational injury pensioners and 34,000 health allowance recipients. Even though no provision could be made in the Estimates for a double payment, the Government as the year went on made every effort to fund enough money to make an additional payment to the less well-off at Christmas time. The Government's concern is indicated in the light of the overall budgetary situation that they still made it possible to make a payment but the maximum amount that the Government could find was only about £20 million. For that amount of money it is not possible to give a double week to all social welfare recipients. It is necessary to make extremely difficult choices between one group and another.

If the Government had chosen to give a double payment to long term recipients of unemployment assistance it would not have been possible to give the double week to the 94,000 widows. I have no doubt but that some long term recipients of unemployment assistance are financially less well off than some widows or some old age pensioners. The Senator has given valid examples here tonight. Unfortunately, without a massive across-the-board means testing operation covering recipients of social insurance as well as social assistance recipients it would not be possible to divide up what the Government managed to make available — that is £20 million — strictly on the basis of financial need. An extremely difficult choice had to be made in terms of broad categories of groups of recipients. This choice becomes more and more difficult as the double week payment at Christmas becomes more costly each year as a result of the annual increases in the weekly rates of social welfare payments and the growing number of recipients.

This year's payment of the double week will cost over £20 million whereas the 1983 similar payment for the same group cost only £18 million. In addition, this year we find that there will be 10,000 extra recipients benefiting from the double week, compared with last year. It will be appreciated that a difficult decision had to be made. The decision that was made by this Government — and also made by previous Governments — was to confine the double payment to pensioners and those in receipt of equivalent payments because pensioners as a group have left the labour force. I should point out that those on long term unemployment assistance have not been forgotten by the Government. They received a special 5 per cent increase in October 1983 in their payments and in July of this year they received a further 1 per cent increase above the general level of increases for social welfare recipients. The Government are very conscious of the plight of the long term unemployed and have shown their concern in a very positive way by giving those additional increases throughout the year over and above the increases given to other categories.

The type of increases which I have outlined are beneficial to the unemployment assistance recipients for the whole year round and not just for one particular period. The special increases I have mentioned are equivalent to an extra three weeks payment to those on long term unemployment assistance. One could think that the Government could have done a clever piece of arithmetic and not granted these special increases but instead giving them in the form of a double payment. If the Government had to do this they would have saved money. The overall amount of social welfare resources devoted to those on unemployment assistance has, of course, been increasing more rapidly in the last few years than any other category of payment: between 1983 and 1984 alone, the increase has been 17½ per cent; this year over £260 million will be spent on unemployment assistance.

I should like people to have no doubt about the fact that I would have preferred by far to have been able to provide the additional benefit of the double week payment at Christmas to the long term unemployed as well as to those who will get it. The resources to do this are not available, and the difficult choice of not to pay it to recipients of unemployment benefits and assistance had to be made. The unemployment benefit and the disability benefit recipients for the duration benefit, in the main, from pay-related benefit. The difficult decision had to be made taking account of this fact, and unemployment assistance was not included.

I should like to thank the Senator for highlighting this aspect of the matter. I should hope that she will appreciate the kind of choices facing the Government, which are very difficult, and that she would accept the assurance that I give about the concern of the Government for the unemployment assistance people. It is a concern that has been shown by the special increases which I have mentioned. I should hope that sufficient resources will continue to be available to help all these people in special need. I hope that I have now clarified the position for the House.

The Seanad adjourned at 8.30 p.m. until 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 21 November 1984.