Eoin Ó Broin
Question:168. Deputy Eoin Ó Broin asked the Minister for Social Protection the number of fuel allowance recipients with children under 18 years of age in the household. [33636/21]
View answerWednesday, 23 June 2021
Questions (168)
Written answers
The Fuel Allowance is a payment which helps households with heating costs. It is available to recipients of a large number of social protection schemes, including State Pensions (Contributory and non-Contributory), Invalidity Pension, One Parent Family Payment, and long term Jobseeker Allowance recipients.
The Fuel Allowance payment is typically added to the usual weekly social welfare payment as an additional payment component. This means that the fuel allowance is different to other social welfare payments in that it is operated across a variety of the Department’s payment systems, rather than one centralised system. Accordingly, it is not always possible to extract the detail requested by the Deputy in relation to fuel allowance across all of the schemes eligible for payment under the scheme. However my Department can confirm that of the 375,269 recipients in receipt of Fuel Allowance in December 2020, 57,276 of these were receiving Child Benefit payments at that time.