Plan for single welfare payment due in March
Senior officials in the Department of Social Protection yesterday said the submission was still being worked on and would need to include “medium-term” timeframes for implementation of a new single payment.
Speaking prior to the joint Oireachtas committee on jobs, social protection and education, department deputy secretary Anne Vaughan said one possibility was that any new single social assistance payment would apply only to new entrants.
She also said a single welfare payment could cover a number of existing payments, including the disability allowance and the carer’s allowance.
Other payments that could be subsumed within a single means-tested payment would be jobseeker’s allowance, the one parent family payment, farm assist, the blind pension and the widow and widower’s non-contributory pension.
Ms Vaughan stressed that no decision had been taken on any of this and, ultimately, it would be the Government’s decision as to what payments would fall under a new regime.
The plan being formulated follows a 2010 report on the same issue which recommended that the carer’s allowance should not be included. A number of committee members pointed this out but Ms Vaughan said there had been no change of tack, and any decision would rest with the Government.
She said no guarantee could be given that certain groups on existing payments might not lose out under a restructured system, nor had any potential savings been worked out under a new system.
Catherine Cox of the Carers’ Association said the organisation was writing to the department and would be mentioning its concerns. “You cannot eliminate a payment without having something else to cover it. It would have to be a payment for the work that carers do.”
