Report on the Review of the Wage Subsidy Scheme

The Wage Subsidy Scheme is a key disability employment support. The scheme aims to encourage private sector employers to offer substantial and sustainable employment to people with disabilities through a subsidy.

The scheme pays a subsidy to an employer if a disabled employee has the skills for the job, but due to their disability produces about 20% less work compared to an employee who does not have a disability doing the same work in the same time allocated.

Carrie has a disability and works as a software developer in Company Cloud, she can write 10 lines of code in 3 hours.

Jessica, also in Company Cloud, does the same work. She does not have a disability. She can write 12 lines of code in 3 hours (20% more than Carrie).

The quality of code Carrie and Jessica write is the same, but Carrie writes fewer lines as her back problem means she has to get up from her chair quite regularly. This can break her concentration so she can’t write code as fast as Jessica.

Read more about the Wage Subsidy Scheme.

The Department of Social Protection conducted a review of the scheme to identify issues and ways to improve the scheme. In order to inform the review, a public consultation ran for four weeks in June and July 2023. This was an opportunity for people to have their say on the future of this scheme. The department received 1,167 survey responses from employers and people with disabilities and 59 written submissions from a range of individuals, disabled persons’ organisations, and stakeholder groups.

The public consultation identified issues with the scheme, such as:

• the minimum hour requirement was too high
• the ‘productivity deficit’ language does not align with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
• there is a lack of awareness of the scheme

To help make the scheme more accessible and flexible for people with disabilities, the review makes six recommendations:

• reduce the required minimum hours of the scheme. The scheme’s hours were reduced from 21 hours per week to 15 hours per week in April 2024 based on this review
• remove the term ‘productivity deficit’ from the scheme
• expand the scheme to employers who employ somebody returning to work in receipt of Partial Capacity Benefit
• expand the scheme to the community and voluntary sector and commercial state-sponsored sector
• review the subsidy rate on a regular basis
• promote and improve knowledge of the scheme

Next steps

We will work over the coming months to implement the recommendations in this report and aim to have the reformed scheme in place from January 2025.

We wish to thank all the people who took the time to make submissions and respond to the surveys as part of the public consultation process. The insights provided are an important part of the review.

Read the full press release here.