Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 25 May 2016
34. Deputy Mick Wallace asked the Minister for Social Protection if he will restore the social protection payments which have been cut over the past seven years, given the impact of rising inflation during this period; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11650/16]
Amharc ar fhreagraMy Department’s allocation for 2016, at over €19.6 billion, is almost €2 billion, or 10.7%, higher than expenditure in 2008. That is a 10.7% increase in eight years. Inflation over the seven years to April 2016 was 2.9%, with inflation falling over the past two years. In the year to April 2016 we had no inflation. In fact, we have had deflation of 0.1%, as measured by the consumer price index in the past year.
After a series of very challenging years, improvements for people in receipt of social welfare payments began in budget 2015 and continued in budget 2016. This included increases in the weekly rates of payment for pensioners and the living alone allowance. In addition, new initiatives aimed at helping families were introduced, such as the back to work family dividend and a paternity benefit scheme which will commence payment later this year.
Looking ahead, the new Programme for a Partnership Government contains a number of significant commitments to enhance the welfare system in the years ahead. This includes increasing rent supplement limits by up to 15% and above-inflation increases for pensioners and in the living alone allowance. The programme also supports rate increases for people with disabilities and carers. As I mentioned earlier, the Government also has plans to extend social insurance benefits for the self-employed and to improve the treatment benefit scheme for all PRSI contributors.
I want to make progress on these commitments in the forthcoming budget and will seek to do so within the additional resources that will be available. I also look forward to engagement and input from my colleagues in the Oireachtas on this matter. I will be holding a pre-budget forum on 22 July next to which I have invited 40 representative organisations. I look forward to that engagement and will listen carefully to the views of the organisations attending.
The Minister said inflation had been low in the past year or two. That is true, but there has been inflation since 2010 and basic social protection payments have been cut by 8% since then. There have also been cuts to secondary welfare supports for people of all ages and family types, along with a tightening of the conditions for accessing jobseeker's benefit. In addition, between 2008 and 2013, the proportion of citizens experiencing deprivation almost trebled to 29%, and over one third of children and one in five working people were classified as experiencing deprivation. These are stark statistics.
I reckon I knocked on 20,000 doors during the election campaign, and the level of deprivation I saw in Wexford was frightening. I was truly shocked. The Minister can tell me that things are not quite so bad-----
Thank you, Deputy Wallace. Your time is up.
-----but the reality is very different on the ground.
It is the case that there has been some inflation since 2009. The changes that happened in social welfare in the past five years can be placed in two categories: those that were part of a reform system designed to encourage more people to become included in society and the economy by taking up work, and others that were done to save money. In the next couple of years I want to start reversing the ones that were done just to save money. To reverse them all would cost somewhere between €3 billion and €4 billion, which is an enormous amount of money, but perhaps we can start doing that and restoring some of the basic weekly payments at the rate of inflation or above over the next couple of years. That is something I would very much like to do.
We touched on statistics when I mentioned the SILC data. As the Deputy will be aware, the most recent data we have are only from 2014, but they did indicate that basic deprivation rates were starting to fall. They fell between 2013 and 2014. We do not have the 2015 figures yet-----
Thank you very much, Minister.
-----but so much of that is down to the way it is calculated. The Deputy will be surprised to learn that there are issues such as the fact that a pay increase for one person can make another person more deprived, even though he or she is not any worse off.
I too wish the Minister well in his job, and I hope he takes a more rational approach to dealing with issues than what we have seen in the past five years. The argument has been made that the Minister is almost trying to protect young people, and people in general, from welfare dependency. The Minister said we could all come up with research results that suited us. Most research shows that young people, and people in general, want to work, but it is the lack of available jobs more than the lack of motivation that is the reason so many of them are not in work. SOLAS and FÁS carried out a survey on their training schemes and found that young people as a group were particularly willing to participate in training schemes and that only 36% in the 15 to 24 age group had found work. I do not expect the Minister to create jobs out of nowhere, but until we can find jobs for people, we need to actively keep them out of poverty by introducing measures to do that.
I thank the Deputy for his kind remarks. I intend to make as good a go of this as I can, and while some people may wish to characterise the Deputy in a particular way, I know he has a more open mind and I hope he will give me a chance to do some of the things I believe both of us would like to do, because nobody wants to see poverty or deprivation in our society, and he can be sure that there is plenty of it in my constituency in West Dublin. I am very aware of it.
Not everything that happened in the past five years is a reason to be proud, but unemployment has almost halved, from 15% to under 8% now. More jobs are becoming available. We need to make sure that those who do not have work are able to get into those jobs. We need to make sure that those jobs pay by increasing the minimum wage, as we will again, abolishing the universal social charge for those on low pay, which we have started already, and extending to people the kind of benefits that may assist them in staying in work, such as health benefits and dealing with the cost of child care. These issues are major disincentives to work. There are a small number of people who perhaps do not want to be in work, and a different approach is required in that sense.
