Good morning Chairman, Deputies and Senators. John O'Neill, OPEN's deputy chairperson and the co-ordinator of PASS, our member group in Finglas, and I welcome the opportunity to appear on behalf of OPEN before the committee to discuss the draft joint committee report on financial disincentives to cohabitation and marriage. We are conscious of time and understand that we have approximately ten minutes with which to offer our reactions to the findings of the draft report, which the clerk has kindly provided to us, so we have attached additional information in our written submission, which members have received.
OPEN is the national network of community-based lone parent groups. The organisation provides a range of development programmes to build the capacity of our membership, one of our core objectives. Our second objective concerns policy and research. Uniquely, OPEN represents one-parent families in social partnership and other social fora. We were established in 1994 in response to the need to form a national network of the growing number of local lone parent-led groups. Our member groups now support between 10,000 and 15,000 one-parent families per year. The organisation is led by a board composed exclusively of lone parents or people with experience of lone parenthood.
We are basing our submission on our observations of the draft report and we welcome the opportunity to attend during this stage of the committee's deliberations. The report uses as its basis the Government proposals on supporting lone parents published in 2006. This seems like a logical place to start, although it should be noted, to be fair and accurate, that the perceived or actual financial disincentives to cohabiting and marriage were not the sole impetus for the development of the proposals. The late Minister, Séamus Brennan, was also motivated by the levels of child poverty among low-income families, including but not limited to those headed by lone parents. This is the point at which we would like to start. Speaking as a national anti-poverty network, poverty is the overarching and underlying issue that continues to impact on one-parent families. We believe that addressing this matter should be the central focus of public policy development and implementation.
The draft report was required to examine the disincentivising potential of the current tax and social welfare systems. It also conducted a somewhat cursory examination of education and training provision, issues to which I will revert. The report contains an unfortunate underlying assumption that the current social welfare system acts as an incentive to the formation of one-parent families. Like our colleagues in One Family, we reject this assumption completely and point out that no evidence is provided for it in the report or any other publication. International evidence does not point to this assumption either, as mentioned by Ms Murphy. While the report can legitimately highlight the potential or real disincentives of the tax or social welfare systems, it should not jump to conclusions about the motivations of family formation in the absence of robust evidence. This is not available in Ireland today and we cannot simply point to the growing numbers of lone parents on social welfare and make crude assumptions about the motivations. Our experience in OPEN is that the routes into lone parenthood are diverse, complex and multifaceted.
The factual position with regard to tax and social welfare systems is outlined, although the latest figures for social welfare are not included, presumably because of the timing, but we have included them in an appendix. As members of the committee will realise, unemployed lone parents are approximately €8 worse off than at this time last year.
Turning to the area of training, the report is unsound in its opening assertion, which we have cited in page 3 of our submission, that those on one-parent family benefit are very slow to take up offers of training even when specifically targeted. This is absolutely not the case; in fact it is quite the opposite. There are myriad examples which contradict this. We name just a few in our submission. In 1997 the introduction of the one-parent family payment led to a huge increase in lone parents participating in community employment and by the end of the year, about 40% of those participating in community employment were lone parents. Some 40% of people in the country who were eligible for community employment were not lone parents. This happened because community employment met very specific needs of one-parent families.
Since 1998 OPEN has provided a national training and development programme for lone parents which has led to accredited and other initiatives in voluntary management, leadership and advocacy, parent support, voter education and negotiation skills, to name a few. Every programme we have provided has been consistently over-subscribed irrespective of where it is run in the country. This is due to the fact that we provide the necessary supports, put courses on at the right times and meet the needs of one-parent families. Our member groups provide a gamut of education, training and vocational programmes which are well attended by lone parents from a variety of backgrounds and in a diversity of locations.
The most recent example of State-provided targeted training is cited in the draft report but, to be fair to the author, it had not taken place when this draft was complete. However, it has been a very interesting experience for the three national lone-parent organisations involved — OPEN, One Family and our colleagues in Treoir. The programme, with the input from the three national lone-parent organisations, has been devised with the needs of one-parent families in mind and it has been seriously over-subscribed. For example, 80 potential participants attended an information session in Finglas and more than 220 attended in Tallaght. This is the first time that FÁS has had this kind of success, the reason being the involvement of the three lone-parent organisations who explained the rocket science of programmes starting at the right time, child care, etc. As Ms Murphy has said there is no question about the motivation, all the figures speak for themselves. One can only conclude that lone parents are highly motivated to attend training and other opportunities which are designed with their needs in mind. We believe that this reality should be reflected in the committee's report.
In regard to the conclusions of the draft report, we agree with the assertion that the objectives of the 2006 paper are as relevant now as they were then. OPEN has supported the overall objectives of the Government proposals to support lone parents. As the only lone-parent representative on the National Economic and Social Forum's team which examined this area in 2000-01, we have consistently sought to highlight and address the range of important and relevant issues affecting one-parent families. We believe that the interests of low-income families are best served by a universal payment which is not linked to marital or family status, that is the parental allowance described in the proposals.
We have offered unqualified support for the ending of the cohabitation rule which we have long argued makes outdated, unrealistic and unsupported assumptions about the dependence of women on their male partners. Its implementation and fears surrounding this, mean that the choices faced by lone parents are limited and fraught.
However, we do not agree with the recommendation in the committee's draft report that the age limit should be seven years of age. As the report points out very eloquently and repeatedly, the lack of adequate child care provision means that lone parents face particular challenges as sole parent and sole breadwinner. We favour a higher age threshold, closer to or at the age group at which most children enter second level. We note and welcome the recommendation that there should be intervention for some years prior to the age limit being reached by the youngest child. That should not be compulsory, but voluntary.
In 2006, in order to prepare our response to the proposals issued at the time, we carried out a series of consultations with lone parents in various parts of Ireland. There was solid support from all; not one lone mother or lone father said, "This is not for me". However, in the Border region in particular lone parents did ask, even then, "Where will the jobs come from?" In other areas, the combination of a lack of child care and patchy rural transport provision means that it will not be realistic to impose an expectation that parents will be able to find work or the means to access employment easily. At this stage, some four years later, even in our biggest cities and towns, families are hard-pressed to find employment of any kind, no matter what their composition.
Nevertheless we agree with the thrust of the final section of the report that even in these difficult times we should pursue the goal of supporting lone parents, indeed all families, to move out of poverty and into secure, sustainable, meaningful employment and-or education and training options. As an anti-poverty network, OPEN has always argued for that policy goal. The fact is that the Department of Social and Family Affairs' own figures show that in spite of the barriers, lone parents move into work at increasing numbers. There is plenty the Department and others, including FÁS, could do to prepare the ground, even in the context of a recession. The priorities identified by our members are as follows: social welfare reform will be needed to develop a universal parental allowance; careful examination of all the Department's schemes will need to continue so that new poverty traps do not emerge; and the Department will need to make a definitive call about the precise age when such family supports, for example income supports, would cease so that parents would be reassured about their payments and any preparatory work which will need to be undertaken. It is unfortunate, on foot of media interviews, that different ages are given, following which OPEN and member groups received numerous phone calls asking what they will do now that their child is 12 years of age. There is a need for consistency and lone parents need to know where they stand.
FÁS will need to reform its delivery of mainstream training, something our founding groups have requested since the mid-1980s. It remains something of a mystery as to why its best courses begin at 8.30 a.m. when parents are en route to school. We have repeatedly been told that this is due to industry standards — but even those who wish to train as hairdressers have to be in class by the designated hour — although to the best of our knowledge in OPEN, no hair or beauty salon in the entire country opens before 9 a.m. or 9.30 a.m. I make that light-hearted reference to try to hammer home what we think is a really important point.
The report makes reference to the changes in rent supplement introduced last year. We share the author's view that the Department should monitor this situation very closely. We are gravely concerned about it. We have long observed in OPEN the piecemeal nature of social welfare development. It is not in the Department's or lone parents' interest that alterations made to one scheme would have an adverse effect elsewhere. OPEN has been a strong advocate of the rental accommodation scheme in which we were involved from the beginning. Committee members will be aware it is being made available at local authority level to those who have long-term renting needs. This scheme supports movement into employment in a way that rent supplement has not and we believe that for those who depend on the private sector, it has enormous potential. The downturn may also result in public lands being made available for the provision of social housing by other means as well, which we would support.
OPEN supports the need to remove any disincentives or discrimination within the tax and social welfare systems which may prevent people from making life choices. However, we would like the committee to note in all its deliberations and publications that families in Ireland are formed in myriad ways and this should be recognised and supported in all public provision. The need to address the startling and continuing poverty of children needs to be a public policy priority. It should not matter where a child is born or what type of family a child is born into or grows up in, no more than having blue, brown or green eyes should matter or be a factor in their equality of condition. Families who separate during childhood years need support so that the trauma experienced is not accompanied by a shift into poverty or further poverty and disadvantage. Ireland can and should strive to be a country where child poverty is confined to history.
Given the levels of misinformation and stereotyping about one-parent families in particular, OPEN welcomes being part of any discussion or development which seeks to address the gaps in such provision. We thank the committee for the invitation to appear before it today and we would be happy to answer any questions or clarifications from members.