DFI Pre Budget 2025 Submission to DSP

Issued on July 10 2024

Submission to Department of Social Protection on Budget 2025

Year in and year out, disabled people live with permanent and deep economic precarity, deprivation and poverty. Despite another likely budget surplus in 2024, many people with disabilities are still left to survive on below the poverty line incomes that have been eroded by inflation. And the ‘full employment’ currently being experienced glosses over the fact that our disability employment rates remain amongst the worst in the EU.

Last year 1 in 2 people unable to work due to long standing health difficulty (disability) lived in enforced deprivation, unable to afford basic essentials like heating, new clothes, or socialising with friends or family.

Something is wrong with our social protection system if it accepts that to be disabled to the extent that you cannot work means that you will struggle to get by on an inadequate income for the rest of your life.

There is strong public and political support to deliver a truly effective social protection system that provides enough support for disabled people. This must include an income sufficient to protect from poverty, and that enables people to live a dignified life, participate in their community, and to cover disability related costs.

This is the final Budget left to deliver the government’s disability poverty reduction targets. Poverty is not inevitable and different policy choices can be made. Urgent corrective action and significant resources will be required in Budget 2025.

To reduce disability poverty, Budget 2025 must:

  • Introduce a recurring Cost of Disability payment of €2,600 a year, or €50 a week.
  • In addition, give households stability and certainty by increasing core rates of social protection by at minimum €20 to restore purchasing power and improve adequacy.
  • Take action to support increased employment, including raising income disregard limits, resourcing the new Reasonable Accommodation Fund (RAF), changing the criteria for the medical card and free travel schemes, and providing sufficient funding to resource actions under the Employment pillar of the forthcoming National Disability Strategy.
  • Take action to make means-testing fairer, to address energy poverty and cost of living pressures, and to benchmark and index social protection payments.
  • Develop and provide resources for both a specific poverty reduction strategy for disabled people and a clear Action Plan to fully address the Cost of Disability over the next 3 years.

For more see our submission.