Annual Report 2020

I welcome the publication of the 2020 Annual Report of the Department of Social Protection.

Since being appointed Minister for Social Protection in June 2020, I have been immensely proud and honoured to lead the Department throughout one of the most challenging periods not only in the history of the Department but also of the country. Protecting people’s health, families, and incomes and maintaining social solidarity has been the government’s priority throughout what has been an incredibly difficult and anxious time.

As a Department, our priority is always to target our resources to the benefit of Irish society, to reduce poverty and deprivation, incentivise employment and to promote inclusion by helping people to access supports to secure and sustain employment. The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, and the essential public health measures, which began in March 2020 to contain its spread, saw the largest monthly increase in the unemployment rate in the history of the State, as we limited our economic activity in order to save lives and protect the critical capacity of our health infrastructure. This has been an extraordinary time and has required extraordinary measures by my Department, including;

• the introduction of an enhanced rate of Illness Benefit for people diagnosed with, or medically advised to self-isolate as a probable case of COVID-19; paid at a rate of €350 per week to support workers to comply with public health measures across society and provide replacement income;
• the introduction of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) and the development of the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme, which was subsequently replaced by the Employee Wage Subsidy Scheme, the latter two funded by this Department but administered by the Revenue Commissioners;
• modifying the PUP as the pandemic progressed to link the payment rate to prior earnings;
• helping self-employed workers including people in the arts and entertainment sector by introducing a new higher income disregard of €960 to enable them to avail of intermittent or occasional work as restrictions eased;
• supporting small self-employed lone traders with their restart costs by introducing a €1,000 support grant;
• waiving ‘waiting days’ for the COVID-19 Enhanced Illness Benefit and for jobseeker payments;
• extending the 2020/2021 fuel allowance season by four weeks;
• moving more than 40 social welfare payments to a fortnightly rather than a weekly payment cycle to provide convenience for our customers, while temporarily reducing numbers of people visiting Post Offices during the first national lockdown;
• extending the period for which social welfare payments can be held at Post Offices to 90 days and enhancing arrangements with An Post to enable nominated agents to collect payments, where necessary;
• simplifying the application process for rent supplement and enhancing the flexibility of the scheme to help people who were temporarily laid-off qualify for the payment;
• establishing a protocol with Tusla to allow victims of domestic violence to access Rent Supplement as seamlessly and as quickly as possible;
• helping one parent families, who lost their job due to COVID-19, by not only providing the Pandemic Unemployment Payment but also maintaining the current rate of their primary payment and putting in place measures to address difficulties with maintenance payments;
• amending the Redundancy Payments Acts to prevent mass redundancies in businesses that may in time recover; and
• removing the obligation to attend a General Registration Office in person to register a birth or a death for the duration of the public health crisis;
• implementing very extensive communications campaigns across national and social media to ensure citizens were aware of the services available to them; while
• in parallel implementing necessary and extensive work changes including remote working for staff of the Department.

In the wake of the arrival of the pandemic in Ireland, the impact on demand for the Department’s income supports was both enormous and immediate. The Pandemic Unemployment Payment scheme was designed, developed and implemented in a matter of days, with a simplified application process including an online option with people who lost their jobs as a result of the public health crisis being quickly and efficiently put into payment. Nearly 900,000 people have received at least one Pandemic Unemployment Payment. A new ‘Income Support Helpline’- a centralised customer service helpline was also created overnight to provide information, advice and updates to people who were applying for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, COVID-19 Enhanced Illness Benefit and the Wage Subsidy Scheme.

The Department worked extremely hard to achieve while at the same time implementing social distancing arrangements for its staff. This required the temporary suspension of much non-essential work and the redeployment of hundreds of Department staff to support the processing of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment and COVID-19 Enhanced Illness Benefit claims and payments as well as manning the customer contact Income Support Helpline and issuing application forms. In addition, 369 staff from other Departments were redeployed throughout 2020 to support the Department, with resource allocations matched to periods of high service demand.

I am immensely proud of the Department’s response. Within three weeks of the launch of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment on 7 April 2020 the scheme had made payments to 507,000 people. Numbers peaked in the first week of May 2020, when some 602,000 individuals were in receipt of this essential income support. Between March and the end of June, 514,000 Pandemic Unemployment Payment applications had been made online. In addition, there were over 573,434 customer contacts from March to December across phone, email and social media received by the Income Support Helpline teams.

Over the course of 2020:

• over 1.2 million people were supported for at least one week by the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme or the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme in 2020;
• of these, 464,439, or 38%, received support from the Pandemic Unemployment Payment only, while 237,588 (19%) recipients were supported by the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme alone. One in eight people (150,150) received at least one payment from all three schemes;
• total Pandemic Unemployment Payment payments amounted to €5 billion with expenditure of €57 million on the COVID-19 Enhanced Illness Benefit, paid to 69,172 recipients. Total expenditure of €3.8 billion on the two Wage Subsidy Schemes introduced (€2.7 billion on the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme and €1.37 billion on the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme) means the total COVID-19 expenditure was €9 billion in 2020.

Despite the intense focus on COVID-19 income supports, my Department continued to provide its core services of designing, developing and delivering effective and cost-efficient income supports, activation and employment services, advising the government and formulating appropriate social protection, social inclusion and employment rights policies. It also continued to provide advice to customers and other related services played an important role in supporting people throughout Ireland from working parents, to Carers, to older people, to those widowed, with a disability or illness.

Overall, in 2020 over 1.63 million people received a social protection payment of one kind or another, with approximately 93 million individual payments being made throughout the year. Expenditure on the Department’s schemes and services totalled €30.46 billion in 2020. This represented expenditure on COVID-19 related schemes which totalled €9.1 billion and with €21.4 billion on other social protection schemes.

As part of our pre-budget consultation process during 2020, a pre-budget forum was held in Dublin Castle in July. The forum offers a unique opportunity for the community and voluntary sector, and employee and employer representatives attending to present their views on what they felt should be included and prioritised in Budget 2021. This key annual event helps to inform myself and officials of my Department on how the Budget could be targeted effectively. At the event, I emphasised the Programme for Government commitment to tackling poverty and social exclusion and promoting participation in society. In addition, a key priority is to support people back into sustainable employment when the economy starts to reopen, through employment supports, training, income supports and direct support from Intreo.

Budget 2021 was framed at a time when there was significant uncertainty as to whether a Brexit deal with the EU would be possible and the future trajectory of the pandemic. Nevertheless, Budget 2021 provided an increase of €10 a week in the income thresholds for the Working Family Payment for families with up to three children and provided an increase of €3.50 in the Fuel Allowance payment, raising it from €24.50 to €28 a week. This helps to alleviate the impact of the carbon tax on over 375,000 low income households. In Budget 2021, the weekly rate for a qualified child was increased by €2 for those under 12 years of age and €5 for children aged 12 years and over bringing the rates to €45 and €38 respectively thus recognising that the costs of raising and caring for children rise as they reach secondary school. The roll out of an enhanced School Meals programme that delivers hot meals instead of cold lunches to up to 35,000 children was also progressed.

In addition, the Living Alone Allowance was increased by €5 from €14 to €19 a week for over 221,000 pensioners, widows and widowers and people with disabilities. Similarly, the Island Allowance was increased for the first time since it was introduced in 2000 by €7.80 to €20 per week and the Widowed or Surviving Civil Partner Grant was increased by €2,000 from €6,000 to €8,000. Conditions of the Hearing Aid Benefit scheme were also changed to provide a flat rate grant of up to €500 for hearing aids and a grant of up to €100 for repairs which will no longer require funding to be matched by the customer. Finally, the Carers Support Grant was increased by €150 to its highest ever level of €1,850.

Innovation to keep services accessible and open was a fundamental aim during the year. Online options to access were introduced for many of the Department’s services – including COVID-19 payments – and proved very popular. In addition, in April 2020 the General Register Office put in place arrangements for parents to register the birth of their new-born babies online as a solution to challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Up to then, parents could only register the births of their children by visiting a General Register Office in person – a system which was in place since 1864 when the first birth in Ireland was registered. This registration mechanism is also linked to the Department’s Child Benefit system and meant that approximately 4,000 parents, who otherwise could not avail of Child Benefit payments, which require birth registration could safely receive this universal entitlement.

One of the Department’s primary goals is to reduce the number of people in consistent poverty, enhance social inclusion and reduce disadvantage in Ireland. To this end, in January 2020, A Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020 – 2025 was approved by the government and published. The Roadmap will build on the work of its prior strategies and aims to reduce the number of people in consistent poverty in Ireland to 2% or less by 2025 and to position Ireland within the top five countries in the EU under several leading social inclusion measures. Towards this end, the Roadmap contains seven high level goals with 22 specific targets which will be delivered by 66 unique commitments (actions) across government. Notwithstanding the impact of the COVID-19 from March 2020, there was good progress in delivering commitments in the Roadmap in 2020 including the implementation of the National Childcare Scheme, developing a successor employment services strategy to Pathways to Work, with a focus on increasing labour market participation and improving employment transitions and the publication of the National Volunteering Strategy.

Work also continued on the important reform and modernisation of our pension system and the Pensions Commission was established by the government in November 2020 as part of a Programme for Government commitment to “examine sustainability and eligibility issues …. and outline options for the government to address issues including qualifying age, contribution rates, total contributions and eligibility requirements”.

The Commission is also examining the impact of retirement ages in employment contracts that are below the State Pension age, and how to further accommodate long-term Carers within the pension system. The Commission’s membership reflects the need to have subject matter experts to deal with the complex social and public policy issues arising in pensions, as well as stakeholder representation to ground the Commission’s work in the lived experience of those in Irish society.

As the unprecedented events of 2020 continue into 2021, we must maintain our prudent approach to the economy and the management of public spending. Neither the impact nor scale of COVID-19 on Ireland’s society and economy was foreseeable, however the consequences of not restoring balance to the public finances while not necessarily imminent, are foreseeable. A necessary step to the restoration of balance will be promoting and supporting the recovery of employment and working to ensure that people displaced from employment by COVID-19 are provided with the opportunity to return to work. This will be a key focus of the Department in the coming years.

We have to look forward as there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We will get through this pandemic and all its associated challenges together, both rural and urban and across all our communities. We are therefore preparing to take the necessary steps that support our recovery both as a society and as an economy. We will support those who have been permanently impacted by the pandemic and will offer employment assistance and advice to these individuals with access to training, education, employment support schemes and work experience opportunities to help them back into employment.

I am proud to say that my Department has, together with the health service, been to the forefront of the government’s response to COVID-19. I am immensely proud of the efforts of my Department’s staff since last March when they mobilised so quickly in response to the crisis. Throughout the year they have shown courage, innovation, resilience and a deep commitment to the public service values. It gives me great confidence that the dedicated, skilled and committed staff of the Department will now step up again to the challenge of helping people back to work in the months ahead.

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