Róisín Shortall
Question:178. Deputy Róisín Shortall asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection the rationale for the restrictions applying to self-employed persons qualifying for family income supplement. [1566/16]
View answerWednesday, 13 January 2016
Questions (178)
Written answers
The family income supplement (FIS) is an in-work support which provides an income top-up for employees with children on low earnings. FIS is designed to prevent child and family poverty and to offer a financial incentive to take-up employment as compared to social welfare payments. There are currently some 55,000 families with some 120,000 children in receipt of FIS. Expenditure on FIS is estimated to be of the order of €349.2 million in 2015.
To qualify for payment of FIS, a person must be engaged in insurable employment which is expected to last for at least three months and be working for a minimum of 38 hours per fortnight or 19 hours per week. Therefore, self-employed people are not eligible for FIS.
The rationale for not extending eligibility for FIS to include self-employed persons includes:
- the practical difficulties in defining and controlling an alternative to the hours worked condition;
- the difficulty in establishing satisfactorily a self-employed person’s hours of employment and certifying this on an ongoing basis;
- existing arrangements to provide income support to self-employed people on low incomes, such as jobseeker’s allowance and farm assist for low-income farmers;
- the cost of extending the scheme to the self-employed would be considerable.
Any extension of FIS to other categories of persons such as self-employed persons would have to be considered in a budgetary context. There are no plans for such an extension in present circumstances.
However, I would bring the Deputy’s attention to the Back to Work Family Dividend, which helps families to move from social welfare into employment, including self-employment, by retaining their qualified child increase for up to two years. As of December 2015 there were 10,554 families in receipt of the dividend, of whom 94 were in self-employment.
Question No. 179 answered with Question No. 36.