Concern that cuts in lone parent allowance may lead to more child poverty

Social and family affairs: Cuts in lone parent allowance, rent allowance and supplement, the back to education allowance and child dependent allowance are among 16 cuts detailed in estimates from the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

Though there will be an increase of 2.5 per cent in the Department's budget to €10.6 billion, the Minister, Ms Coughlan, said a number of schemes had been "reviewed and adjusted to ensure sound management of public funds" and to "ensure that I am in a position to care for those less-well-off, disadvantaged, ill, or unemployed".

The cut receiving most immediate criticism yesterday evening was that in the one-parent family allowance. The transitional half-rate payment of this allowance to lone parents who take up employment and earn more than €293 per week is to be stopped.

This temporary allowance had acted as a "cushion" to encourage lone parents, often wary of taking up employment and losing their allowance, into work.

The change, said Ms Coughlan, would be offset by low-income families being entitled to family income supplement. However, the Department's estimates detail a cut in the FIS budget of 4 per cent. Prof John Monaghan, vice-president of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, said the discontinuation of the transitional lone-parent allowance would "produce poverty traps".

"We're meant to be about trying to encourage lone parents into work. If anything this payment should have been increased. It makes a nonsense of any argument from the Government that they are serious about tackling child poverty."

Mr Ray Dooley, of the Children's Rights Alliance, described this cut as a "very disappointing development". Citing Government figures that 70,000 children were in consistent poverty and 300,000 in relative poverty, he said this measure would only exacerbate the "overwhelming vulnerability of children in lone-parent families to poverty".

The children at greatest risk of poverty are those in families headed by an unemployed, lone or disabled parent. The Minister also announced that rent supplement would now be refused to people unless they had been renting private accommodation for at least six months. This measure would cause "severe hardship", said Prof Monaghan.

"If you take a lone parent, for example, living at home with their parents, managing on welfare of say €160 per week, and with rents in most areas at about €1,000 per month, well, those people are not going to be able to get their own accommodation. I can see this causing huge angst in families."

Prof Monaghan said his impression was that the cuts were "mean, petty and extremely discouraging".

When asked whether this would be tough on people, forcing them to rent on their own before getting support, the Minister said, "I appreciate that."

"I am not the housing authority. My rent supplement is supposed to be for people who have a change in circumstance and it cannot be probable for them to pay rent. That has changed and evolved over the last number of years because of the flexibilities of the scheme. We have had people on SWA [rent supplement] for a number of years who have not been facilitated with more long-term option by the local authorities."

She stressed that if there was an emergency, community welfare officers would be able to make a rent supplement available.

The back to education allowance, there to encourage those on welfare into education, will also be cut. From now on a person must be on welfare for at least 15 months to be eligible for it, where the qualifying period had been six months. The estimates detail increased expenditure on child benefit of €70 million, on the old age contributory pension of €51 million, on widow and widowers contributory pension of €23 million, on disability allowance of €40 million and on supplementary allowance of €72 million.