Budget 2017: €500 boost for going back to education
A package of supports will be announced under Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar and will include a €5 increase in the one-parent family payment and back to education allowance.
A new annual €500 cost of education allowance will form part of the package to help parents return to education. This will be made available to back to education allowance participants, who will also see an increase of €5 a week.
The income disregard for the one-parent payment and job-seekers’ transition payment will also rise by €15 a week.
When assessing welfare payments, a certain amount of a person’s average net weekly earnings are not taken into account, this is called an earnings disregard.
Increasing the disregard means that less will be assessed or taken into account from a person’s income when deciding what the maximum job-seekers’ payment or one-parent allowance claim can be.
Furthermore, the back to education allowance will also be made available more quickly and will now be claimable after nine months rather than 12.
However, last night many of the final details contained in the budget were still being negotiated between Fine Gael, the Independent Alliance and Fianna Fáil.
With just 19 hours to go before Mr Noonan was due to stand up to announce tax measures in Budget 2017, the Independent Alliance rushed to have their measures around older people, health and rural Ireland included the package.
Arriving at Government Buildings yesterday evening Kevin ‘Boxer’ Moran said: “There are a few key issues we want to get over the line in respect of the people we support and the people who support us.”
Members of the Independent Alliance were pushing for decreases in prescription charges for the elderly with Shane Ross demanding “substantial relief” of charges.
It is understood that last night the Government offered a decrease of €5 on prescription charges bringing the cap from €25 to €20 per month.
The main sticking point for Fianna Fáil last night was increases to the State pension and the timeline around introducing these increases.
A number of proposals around the roll-out date were put forward as negotiations continued late into night.
While Fianna Fáil initially wanted a €5 boost to be introduced from January of next year, Mr Varadkar had pushed for a June date.
There was also some last-minute wrangling over other benefits including for the blind, widows, people on disability allowance and carers would have to wait until June to see their payments increase.
Earlier in the day Finance Minister Michael Noonan said he expected today’s budget to go through “without drama” but that Fine Gael had some “rather small difficulties” to iron out with Fianna Fáil.
Mr Noonan said “challenges” for the minority government “were quiet foreseeable when the Government was formed”.
€1.5m needed to help pupils
At least €1.5m will have to be found elsewhere in Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar’s budget to meet a higher-than-expected bill for back-to-school support payments this year.
Although €38.8m has been set aside for the back to school clothing and footwear allowance, it has almost all been spent with nearly 11,000 applications still to be finalised.
Last year, 159,960 families received average payments of €258, in a spend of over €41m.
So far this year, 146,700 have received payments, including 108,000 who received automatic payments of €27m in July without needing to apply to the Department of Social Protection.
For the 38,699 families so far awarded the allowance after direct applications, around €10.9m has been paid out.
With around 10,700 applications still to be processed by yesterday morning, and an 86% success rate to date for those claims already finalised, over 9,200 applicants might yet expect to get a payment under the scheme.
Based on the average €282 award to successful applicants already this year, the remaining claims could add more than €2.6m to the €37.9m spent so far.
Even the €258 average paid to all 146,700 families so far this year — which includes the 108,000 automatic recipients — would add nearly €2.4m and bring the final bill to around €40.3m.
This would leave a shortfall of at least €1.5m on the €38.8m budget for the allowance in Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar’s 2016 spending estimate.
This would require him to find the relevant amount elsewhere in this year’s departmental budget of over €19bn.
In 2015, the department under-estimated spending on the back-to-school allowance by nearly €3m, when over 10,000 families fewer qualified than the expected 170,300.
The average payment to qualifying households was also slightly lower than the estimated amount.
Mr Varadkar has been strongly lobbied to increase the amounts paid and to widen the scheme to cover more families.
The amounts which families receive are €100 for children aged four to 11, and €200 for those aged 12 to 22 and in full-time second-level education, but had been €200 and €300 before successive budget cuts.
The full restoration of those rates is not expected in Budget 2017 today, but would cost over €28m if paid in respect of 281,000 children, the same number for whom payments were made in 2015.
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