I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this very important issue in the House tonight. Injustice, inequity and unfairness are now the hallmarks of the national fuel scheme as revised by the Minister for Social Welfare, Deputy Woods.
The winter freeze-up marks the big freeze-out for many deserving needy persons. My main criticisms of the scheme are under three headings. First, people with similar incomes and in similar circumstances to those in designated categories are not now permitted to qualify. Secondly, and even worse, the discretion of the health board officers has been substantially interfered with in a way that is quite sinister in that the Minister has refused to produce the guidelines issued to health board officers which restrict that discretion. Thirdly, in many ways the fuel scheme as at present administered is leading to a Star Chamber-type injustice. It is Kafkaesque in some ways in that applicants do not have access to the guidelines on which their claims are decided and furthermore they have no right of appeal against such arbitrary decisions.
The Minister for Social Welfare has attempted to defend the indefensible by making reference to a large number of additional applicants who will qualify under the revised scheme, but it transpires from a reply by him in the Dáil on 15 November that there will be no additional numbers in the 1988-89 scheme as opposed to the numbers who qualified in 1987-88. The scheme has given rise to huge anomalies and it is quite unjust and unfair that people with similar or lower incomes and worse circumstances than those qualifying are now being excluded from the scheme. Let me give some examples. Under the scheme as promulgated by the Minister two people who would be eligible in their own right are both debarred because they are sharing the same household. A widow living with a son who is in receipt of long-term unemployment assistance will find that she and her son are debarred from entitlement. People whose sole source of income is an occupational pension, other than a State pension, which is lower than a contributory old age pension are debarred from entitlement, although they are worse off. Deserted wives who are existing on maintenance payments which are less than the social welfare deserted wife's benefit are debarred from the scheme. People who are in receipt of pensions from the UK and elsewhere which are less than the contributory old age pension rate are also debarred. There are so many anomalies that I could detail them through the night.
The most outrageous of all is the situation of the long-term unemployed person whose son or daughter is at school but happens to have reached the age of 18. I personally know of a number of such cases and a couple of them have come to my attention in Bandon, my home town. Quite a number of my colleagues have also come across such cases and it appears to be a reasonably widespread problem. Let us look at the situation of an unemployed person who does what many would believe is the right thing by encouraging their offspring to complete their second level education. If that child reaches the age of 18, naturally they will not be entitled to unemployment assistance. The father loses the child dependency allowance for that son or daughter, which amounts to about £10.20 per week. The mother loses child benefit of £15.05 per month or £3.47 per week. To compound this, the Minister now tells them they are not entitled to the winter fuel allowance. Is the presence of this son or daughter who is studying for the leaving certificate supposed to heat the household? This family, doing the right thing by encouraging their offspring to remain at school are penalised not just by the loss of the child dependency allowance and the child benefit but by an additional £5 per week through the loss of the winter fuel allowance. This is probably the most outrageous of many anomalies under this scheme. It is totally without justification that such an anomaly should continue.
I have come to the conclusion that the Minister is not very proud of the scheme. It is rather odd that my many efforts to get full details of the scheme met with a blank wall as far as the Minister was concerned. Telephone calls to his Department seeking detailed information were met with the courteous response that leaflets were available, which were duly sent to me. My inquiries about the guidelines on which the scheme was based received no response. I raised the issue on the Order of Business on a number of occasions and received no response. I then put down a Dáil Question seeking to have made available in the Oireachtas Library the guidelines on which the revised national fuel scheme was being operated by the Minister's Department and the health boards. I got a page of ráiméis, the bottom line of which was that such guidelines were for internal use only and that Members of this House would not be permitted sight of such. That is surely not a way in which any democratic system should operate. That a reasonable request should be met in that fashion is absolutely outrageous. It indicates that the Minister attempted to ensure that Members of the Opposition would not be furnished with the guidelines on which the scheme is based. It is something of which the Minister should not be very proud and I as a democrat must take issue with it. It is clear that the Minister's reluctance to produce the guidelines arises from the fact that the said guidelines prescribe a significant reduction in the discretionary role of health board officers, which will of course affect many needy people and which may be illegal under the Social Welfare (Consolidation) Act.
I have been fortunate in that, while I was unable through normal channels to obtain a copy of the guidelines in question, I have been able to obtain access to a copy by other means. In this four-page memorandum, which the Minister did not think Members of this House should see, there is a direction issued by his Department to the health boards making it clear that the discretion of health board officers, granted under sections 209 and 212, are to be considerably circumscribed, that is, that the normal discretion available to the community welfare officer will no longer be exercised as heretofore.
I mentioned that there must be a question of some illegality in relation to these guidelines because the Social Welfare (Consolidation) Act, a major Act with over 300 sections and with which I have some connection as I was chairman of the committee which dealt with it, specifically provides the circumstances in which the health boards can deal with cases of need. It is entirely inappropriate that the Act with these sections should be interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted by the Minister to the extent where the discretion which was up to now exercised by health board officers is no longer available to them by direction of the Minister.
Section 212 of that Act specifically provides that a health board may, in any case where it considers reasonable having regard to all the circumstances of the case, determine that supplementary welfare allowance shall be paid to a person by way of a single payment to meet an exceptional need. Yet it is clearly stated in the secret guidelines that payments under this section should not be made unless specifically stated in the guidelines, unless there are exceptional circumstances involved, and then it makes clear it was never intended that these sections be used to pay fuel allowances to persons who are not catered for under the national fuel scheme. I am not sure how that interpretation could have issued from the Department in light of the fact that the Act goes back seven years and that the national fuel scheme as revised by the Minister only came into operation last month. I cannot see the sense in the direction that it was never intended that these sections would be used to pay fuel allowances to persons not catered for under the national fuel scheme. It is odd, to say the least, that there should be such a retrospective interpretation of the spirit of the Act which was put through by this House in 1981.
In considering the broad issues of social welfare, it is clear that changes in the social welfare system should be guided by broad parameters. Everyone in the House will agree that the broad parameters I have in mind are sensible and can be supported by all. The kind of objectives against which one should measure such a scheme are those parameters which I would define as follows: first, there should be an adequate level of support for the poor; second, we should have a system that targets help on those who need it most; third, there should be a graduated response to different levels of need; fourth, there should be a simple and understandable system, and fifth, there should be a system which gives discretion to those who operate at the front line.
Measured against any of those objectives for a fair and just system, the national fuel scheme, as revised by the Minister, does not measure up. He has put in place rigid rules which make no allowance for hardship. The local information, painstakingly built up by community welfare officers over the years, is cast out the window and now we have rules from Dublin, and if the cases do not fall within their guidelines, tough luck. The people are told to stay out and stay cold, that they need not come back knocking on the window.
In recent times we have heard of the ESRI report on poverty. This raised an awareness of the need for a more caring approach to the needy in our society. More and more people want a caring attitude, one which is responsive to the needs of the poorer people. The solution to the problem is to ensure that those who are worse off than those who now qualify under the scheme are given an opportunity to have access to the scheme and not left to freeze in the winter and, very importantly, we must restore to the local health board officers the discretion which has been withdrawn by this secret directive and which they exercised capably, fairly and with compassion in the past. In this way there will be a reasonable chance that those in real need will be sought out and their needs catered for.
