Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 18 October 2018
316. Deputy Willie O'Dea asked the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the estimated full-year cost of increasing the income disregard for carer's allowance from €332.50 to €665, single, and from €450 to €900, taking into account increases announced in budget 2019; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [42784/18]
View answerThe Government acknowledges the crucial role that family carers play and is fully committed to supporting carers in that role. This commitment is recognised in both the Programme for a Partnership Government and the National Carers’ Strategy.
Carer's allowance (CA) is a means tested payment, made to people who are providing full-time care and attention to elderly people or to people with disabilities and whose income falls below certain limits. The principal conditions for receipt of the allowance are that full time care and attention is required and being provided and that the means test which applies is satisfied.
The conditions attached to payment of CA are consistent with the overall conditions that apply to social assistance payments generally. This system of social assistance supports provides payments based on an income need with the means test playing the critical role in determining whether or not an income need arises as a consequence of a particular contingency - be that illness/disability, unemployment or caring.
The means test for Carer's Allowance is already one of the most generous in the social protection system in that €332.50 of gross weekly income is disregarded in the calculation of means for a single person; the equivalent for someone who is married, in a civil partnership or cohabiting is €665 of combined gross weekly income. A married couple with 2 children could have weekly earnings of €734 net of PRSI, superannuation and union subscription costs and still qualify for the full rate of Carer's Allowance. This is equivalent to over €38,000 per annum.
CA is a demand-led schemes and doubling the earnings disregard would be expected to increase the demand for these payments and lead to additional programme and administration costs. It is not possible in the time available to make robust estimates using administrative data of the level of additional programme costs particularly as such a change would be highly sensitive to the income distribution in households at the time it was implemented.
My department did make an estimate in 2017 of the estimated cost of increasing the weekly income disregards for Carer’s Allowance from €665 to €716 (+€51) (couple) and €332.50 to €358 (+€25.5)(single )using administrative records and various assumptions. This analysis suggested that it would cost in the region of €51 million in 2017 (an increase of 7.3% on the programme allocation at the time). The estimated cost of the higher increase specified in the question might be expected to be several multiples of this amount.
I hope that this answers the Deputy’s question.
