I move amendment No. 9:
In page 10, after line 35, to insert the following:
“Report on extending Jobseeker’s Transitional Payment
19. The Minister shall, within six months of the passing of this Act, lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas on options to extend access to the Jobseeker’s Transitional Payment until a youngest child reaches 18 years of age.”.
I will be brief in regard to both of these amendments. They are issues that we have touched on before. I urge the Minister to reexamine the jobseeker's transitional payment. The current situation is that lone parents are treated unequally within the social protection system. Lone parents are entitled to the one-parent family payment until a child is seven and then from the ages of seven to 14, they are entitled to the jobseeker's transitional payment, which again requires that they engage, as the Minister mentioned, and look at potential options, but it removes the requirement for full-time availability for work of 40 hours a week. The jobseeker transitional payment is appropriate in that it encourages attachment to the labour market or training, and it requires that kind of engagement. It has options for how to build workplace attachment during that period, but it does not have the very blunt tool of full-time availability, which is somewhat a legacy of the fact that our entire social welfare system was formed very much on a single-male breadwinner model with a usually female carer at home, unacknowledged and unrewarded. We mentioned the income disregard for carer's allowance. There is still a limit of 18.5 hours that one can work. The income disregard there may be increased but the number of hours in which one can work is still quite constrained.
Let us compare a lone-parent family with two children and another family with two children where there are two parents. The two-parent family can have somebody full-time at home until the child is 18. That is covered by the social welfare code because there is a qualified adult increase, which allows for the social welfare payment one party receives - usually but not always the male – to have a qualified adult increase in recognition that there is an adult in the house who is doing other work, usually caring work, and then there are the two children. They can have somebody caring for a child up to the age of 18. It is not a high income to live on, but they have that option. A lone parent who also has the children, but who does not have the ancillary support of the second parent, is required to be full-time in the workplace. Many lone parents choose to be in the workplace when a child is 14, but the teenage years can sometimes be the most difficult years for some children. It can be a time when parents who work need to be able to leave at 4 p.m. They might want to work a 25-hour or 30-hour week and be at home when the child comes home. Those are really key years. The children cannot just be put in a crèche when they are 14 or 15.
This is an example of the inequality right through from the Constitution to here, whereby the work a lone parent does is given less value, support and weighting in the social welfare system than in a two-parent family. There is a fundamental inequality. A two-parent family has the option to have somebody at home at 4 p.m., when a child leaves school but a one-parent family does not. They are required to be available for full-time work. It is a very small change that I do not believe would cost a huge amount. I do not believe it would even be taken up by every lone parent, but simply extending the jobseeker transitional from 14 to 18 would say we acknowledge that the parent is still parenting until the child is 18.
It would say that we want lone parents to engage in opportunities in employment and training and education, but we are not going to insist on the full-time availability being a condition of the parent getting any money at all from the State. I believe it would be appropriate and would fix what was an extremely bad decision initially that had knock-on effects for many years. It would also go a step towards improving the equality of families in the State.
Amendment No. 10 relates to pay-related benefit, which has been referenced here. I have a concern, and I flagged this with the Minister when the legislation on pay-related benefit was coming through. I still share this concern. I believe it is significant. As I understand it currently, if a person loses his or her job, then he or she can access the pay-related benefit that may give a higher replacement rate but he or she will not get qualified child or qualified adult payments attached to that pay-related benefit. Again, this may have been changed but this is as I understand it currently. The person will instead be directed to go to the jobseeker's benefit and get that, which intrinsically is often set at a lower rate, the standard rate as we had it, but it allows for an increase for a qualified child or qualified adult. It is very important if we have this pay-related benefit scheme that it should also have - just like jobseeker's benefit - access to the qualified child or qualified adult payments. Otherwise, fundamentally we are saying that when single people lose their job we want to make sure they have a replacement income and it becomes a situation where the pay-related benefit only makes sense for the single persons on high incomes, and a particular imaginary kind of worker lots of whom are in the tech sector and others of a particular age. These are getting a high replacement rate when they become unemployed and everybody else is effectively subsidising that. For families it will not make sense to get the pay-related benefit if qualified child payments are not included and qualified adult payments are not included. Effectively we end up with a two-tier system in which families are disadvantaged. For families it becomes a matter of "Well you have to settle for just the jobseeker's benefit plus the qualified adult and child payments". The person without children or a single person is in a situation with less responsibility, and probably in that context with less serious concerns, although I am not saying they do not have serious concerns because every individual has their own concerns. However, a lot of the narrative we have had around the idea of this pay-related benefit is that we do not want households having a plummet in income that leaves them unable to cover the basics.
As I understood when the Bill passed, it was not envisaged at the time that qualified child or qualified adult payments would be available for recipients of the pay-related benefit scheme. Is there a pathway towards that? Is there a gender analysis and an equality analysis around who is benefiting from the pay-related scheme? Is it predominantly men who are benefiting or predominantly women? Is there a gender analysis of that? Is it mainly benefiting individuals or are families consistently choosing, and feeling they have to choose, to go to job seekers benefit instead? This is a key piece. It is an anomaly because when we originally talked about the idea of pay-related replacement it came in as a very worthy case. I was glad that the Government did the right thing around domestic violence leave and the idea that we would have full replacement rates and higher replacement rates. A very strong case has been made for the idea of having a better replacement rate for parental leave, for example, or other forms of leave that would incentivise people to take that leave. It is family-friendly policies that have pushed the idea of a replacement rate being increased but I feel in the design of this scheme it specifically may disadvantage families.
