I move:
That Dáil Éireann calls on the Government to introduce a subsidy for low income families and individuals towards the cost of their ESB charges.
As the House is aware, on 12 June last the Government announced that the price of electricity was to go up by no less than 20 per cent. The Irish Times reported that the increase was approved by the Government on 12 June, a few days after the European and local elections. It has been suggested that the proposed increase from 1 June this year will add about 2 per cent to the cost of living overall. I submit that this increase, together with recent substantial increases in the cost of food, will have a further substantial impact on the annual rate of inflation and will certainly push it well over the double figure for 1978.
It has also been suggested that the increase will add between £1 and £3 per month to the accounts of most ESB consumers. This increase has come at a time when some 40 per cent of ESB subscribers have not paid their bills for several months. It appears that four out of every ten households are substantially in arrears and these arrears amount to a sum in the region of £20 million. The proposition of the Labour Party is that within the range of ESB subscribers as a whole there are families and individuals who have a very low income and who generally have difficulty in paying their ESB bills, even when there is not a postal dispute. This increase, together with the abolition of food subsidies, puts pressure on these people well beyond the amelioration offered by the Government in the recent budget.
Further increases in the price of crude oil are also in the offing and it is expected that these increases will have a further substantial impact on ESB charges in the autumn. If that is so, it strengthens the case that the Government should give some consideration to the introduction of a wider scheme of selective subsidies to well-defined categories of subscribers in the low income group. The Exchequer should endeavour to bear this cost.
This motion is tabled in anticipation of the coming winter. This country has endured an unprecedented period of appalling weather and the prospect is that there will be a critical situation in regard to fuel supplies and fuel costs before this House reconvenes next October. Even now there is a delay of three or four weeks in receiving supplies of coal from the monopoly which controls coal distribution. In addition to all this there is the unprecedented postal dispute.
The people worst hit in this situation are the low income consumers. If the Minister would stroll down to Townsend Street any morning — I would bring him myself tomorrow morning—he would see 500 or 600 people queueing up, even on an extremely warm day such as today. Elderly people, young people and mothers with children have been queueing up on the various morning allotted to them. Several thousand are processed like broiler chickens instead of human beings. They queue in Townsend Street and down a filthy back lane waiting for their cheques. These are the people who must try to allocate from their cheques enough money to meet their ESB bills. They do not get very much, even in these days of alleged affluence. A husband and wife with two children with full benefit get about £30. The last item for payment is the ESB bill, as many public representatives know when supply is cut off.
I know people are cynical about politicians generally, but I am sure the degree of cynicism on the part of consumers was heightened when the announcement of the increase was deliberately withheld until after polling day for the European and Local Elections. Sanction was given and the announcement came a couple of days after the close of the polls for these two elections. If I may chide the Government, that is hardly the mark of a Government, with a secure majority of 20, the largest majority in the history of the State.
We should turn our minds in a responsible way to alleviating, as far as possible, the hardship which will be suffered most in the coming winter by families and individuals with low incomes. Many families directly affected by unemployment, by redundancy, and quite a number also by the post dispute, are on the poverty line. Despite the efforts of the previous administration when they went marginally above the poverty line, largely due to the major efforts of my colleague Deputy Cluskey in the Department of Social Welfare, they have slipped back again and have had no real net improvement in the past 12 months. The inflation rate, now running at 12 or 13 per cent, has well and truly overtaken the increases given in social welfare. It is important to point out to the Minister that in very many instances those increases have not yet been paid due to the postal dispute.
Special consideration should be given to the ESB accounts of those families. I want to draw another distinction. The ESB account tends to be quite different from the differential rent paid by an individual. If a person suffers a period of unemployment his differential rent falls and is adjusted accordingly. It can drop by as much as two-thirds for a person who is suddenly caught by unemployment. By and large the ESB bill is a constant and progressive expenditure having regard to the increases in charges. Little account is taken of the income circumstances of families, even though families with high incomes usually spend more on electricity.
The unemployed person, the redundant person, the deserted wife in our society, single parent families, deserted parents, and deserted children who are living in homes or are fostered out, have not got the benefit of the free electricity scheme or the subsidised scheme. My plea to the Minister is that some consideration should be given to these categories, and our proposition is extremely modest. Consideration should be given to reducing the qualifying age for free electricity. It should be brought down to 65 years. This would not be a terribly costly exercise.
As far as I can gather, at the moment the Exchequer spends about £6 million a year on the free electricity scheme. The current estimate for 1979 is £5.9 million and 132,659 people will benefit. If the qualifying age were reduced to 65 years some additional thousands would be added on to the scheme. I have not got the exact age quota, but the cost would not be excessive. It was and is an excellent scheme. It was introduced in 1967 and has been of progressive benefit to the community down through the years.
As the Minister knows, in our constituency the number of people in their early sixties requiring heat above all, living in flats and rooms with high ceilings and not much heat, is appalling. At the age of 65 or 66 years the prospects of having free electricity at that critical age, when in many cases people are entering into what we now call regrettably old age, would be of considerable value to them. By and large the present electricity allowance is confined rather rigorously to persons receiving old age pensions, blind pensions, invalidity pensions, disabled pensions, and so on, and they have to be living alone, or living with a dependent wife, or an invalid husband, or another invalided person.
The average cost of the subsidy at the moment under the free electricity scheme seems to be about £45 a year for the approximately 132,000 people who qualify. Additional groups and categories should now be added on to the scheme. One could mention groups in our society like deserted wives with children. There are about 3,400 deserted wives with children in our society. If one applied the £45 subsidy to those deserted wives, the total cost would be about £150,000 only, which even in the context of a supplementary budget would be scarcely worth mentioning.
Needless to remark in the case of the 3,400 wives with children, one would probably be paying the allowance only to those living alone. I know some deserted wives who live alone with their children, and the ESB bill is a two-monthly crucifixion because the income of a deserted wife is extremely low. It is £25 or £30 a week with supplementary benefits or allowances, the old home assistance. The increase in the ESB bill will be quite substantial. Some deserted wives live with other persons, their mothers, or their fathers, or in a general setting with other persons, and they might not qualify. Assuming half of the deserted wives live alone with their children, the cost would be about £70,000 or £80,000 a year to give them the same ESB subsidy.
There is another category of persons for whom I should like to make a special plea because they are on low incomes. I refer to unmarried mothers.
There are 4,000 unmarried mothers in receipt of allowances. I do not know what percentage of unmarried mothers live alone with their children but some of them live in flats and I can only describe as heroic the efforts these women make to care for their children, to feed and clothe them and to educate them. If an unmarried mother earns more than £6 per week she will have a problem in regard to qualifying for the allowance. This means that these women who live in flats in urban areas have for the most part no income but the allowance. Therefore, they live quietly because there is not enough money for spending on any type of social activity. The application of the free electricity scheme to this group would be of major social benefit. In most cases an unmarried mother has only one child although in some cases there may be more than one child. The cost of extending the free electricity scheme to them would not be very much. If one were to take a situation in which only one in every three unmarried mothers lived alone, the cost per year would be about £60,000.
There is another large group of people for whom I should also like to make a special plea. I refer to adult dependants with children who are unemployed. There are about 32,000 families in this category. We know that there is a large number of single persons unemployed and in many of these cases there are adult dependants involved. The extension of the free electricity scheme especially in respect of those who are on what might be termed unemployment of a long duration would be of major benefit. Some of these people may be unemployable through no fault of their own. To extend the free electricity scheme to them would hardly cost more than £500,000 per year. Admittedly it would have to be on an intermittent basis since the unemployed find jobs though they may become unemployed again, but the group I am talking of are deserving of special consideration.
I shall not protract my argument in relation to these groups except to make a plea for that group of one-parent families, particularly widowed mothers and also, as is the case in quite a few instances nowadays, fathers who have lost their wives and who are caring for their children at home. These families, in terms of the selective application of subsidies, a concept that seems to be close to the hearts of many Ministers in these islands, deserve special consideration. The people in the various groups for whom I am making this plea spend more time in their homes than is the case of people in any other group. They have little social life because they cannot afford to spend money on anything other than the absolute necessities. They do not have cars. In their homes they are dependent on the lifeline of electricity accounts.
The Minister might consider also making available additional funds in the coming winter months to the officers of the various health boards for allocating supplementary welfare allowances. Additional discretion should be developed on these officers and additional funds made available to them so that they could help those in urgent need and who will be faced with the additional burden of heavy ESB bills. If the officers had this discretion they could pay some part of the extra amount due for electricity so as to help those people. This would mean that the additional fuel subsidy funds would be spent by way of the greatest allocation going to those most in need in accordance with the discretion of the officers concerned. With the hopefully early termination of the postal dispute and with the subsequent issuing of thousands of bills to consumers, I can envisage a situation going into the winter when the crunch period will arise in terms of arrears being paid and when many families will need the kind of additional discretionary assistance that I am talking of.
These, then, are some of the categories that I consider worthy of our special care. Down through the years successive Governments have effected major improvements in the scheme. The scheme which was introduced in 1967 and which cost then about £35,000 has grown and has been of major benefit. In 1968-69 about 40,000 people qualified in terms of that scheme while in 1973-74 the number was 74,000 and in 1976 the number exceeded 100,000. In 1978-79 the number of people expected to qualify in terms of the scheme is 132,000. The Coalition Government extended the scheme to include those in receipt of invalidity pensions from the Department or those in receipt of disabled person's maintenance allowances. In 1975 the qualifying age of eligibility for the free electricity scheme was reduced to 67. It had been reduced in the 1974 budget to 68 and in the 1973 budget to 69. This Government have been in office for two years and so far they have not made any change in the scheme. It is now necessary to remind the Minister that within the budgetary strategy of the Government, if one might call it that, there should be no great problem in meeting these modest suggestions. What I am asking for would not cost more than £1 million a year on top of the £6 million already being spent. It will go to those in greatest need. When one considers the millions of pounds whittled away by the Government during the past two years on the most grandiose subsidies to the most grandiose families in the country in wealth tax, the virtual abolition of the capital gains tax, the sweeping, across the board virtual abolition of motor tax, all I am asking for is a fraction of that money to be given to those in greatest need. The Government have well within their capacity the financial resources to assist in that regard.
I accept that there must be an economic rate charged for electricity but I do not accept that the consumer should have to bear the full burden. I reject the suggestion that all consumers, irrespective of income, should have to pay a penal rate when the Government have within their capacity the financial resources to pay a small subsidy to those in greatest need. I ask the Government to give our motion the most sympathetic consideration. If they are unable to accept it this evening I ask that consideration be given to it in the next budget. The only aspect of the amendment put down by the Minister for Economic Planning and Development that I can support is in relation to the need to achieve greater economies in the use of energy. I ask, particularly in relation to electricity, that the Government should review the income taxation relief allegedly offered if one avails of the ESB installation allowances because they do not provide any great incentive to families to avail of the offer. A great deal more work could be done in that regard. I regret, apart from the Minister's call to achieve greater economy in the use of energy, that the amendment proposed by the Government is not worthy of general support.
