Social welfare expenditure amounted to £4,377 million in 1996, which represented 28.5 per cent of net current Government spending and was equivalent to 12 per cent of GNP, according to the annual report of the Department of
Social, Community and Family Affairs.
More than 874,000 people were receiving weekly social welfare payments at the end of 1996. As these payments included increases in respect of more than
137,000 adult dependents and more than 457,000 child dependents, there were almost 1.5 million beneficiaries in all.
This represents an 0.2 per cent increase in the number of recipients since
1995 and a rise of 1.4 per cent in the number of beneficiaries over the same period.
The expenditure was financed by social insurance contributions from employers
(27.8 per cent), employees (10.9 per cent) and the self-employed (2.14 per cent), with the remaining 59.01 per cent financed by the Exchequer.
The main areas of expenditure were: old age (22.83 per cent), widows, widowers and one-parent family (16.43 per cent), child-related payments (9.33
per cent), illness, disability and caring (12.68 per cent) and unemployment support (25.02 per cent). Administration of the social welfare system accounted for 4.61 per cent of total expenditure.
The average number of people on the live register claiming unemployment benefit and unemployment assistance decreased from 262,216 in 1995 to 261,524 in
1996.
The Department says this showed that the measures taken to help people make the transition from welfare to work were starting to take effect in the period covered by the report.
"This reduction, of course, snowballed since then with a drop of over 24,000
in the number claiming unemployment benefit and assistance on the live register in June 1997," the Department said.
More than 16,000 people participated on the back-to-work allowance scheme in
1996, while more than 2,800 people availed of second chance education under the third-level allowance. Funding for these schemes increased by more than 55 per cent and 77 per cent respectively between 1995 and 1996.
There was an overall increase of 7.1 per cent in the programme for widows, widowers and one-parent families. The largest percentage increase was in expenditure on the lone-parents allowance (12.3 per cent). There are now 50,557
recipients of this allowance: 74.2 are unmarried parents; 23.3 are separated spouses; 3.3 per cent are widowed and 0.2 per cent are prisoners' spouses.
The widows and widowers (contributory) pension involved both the largest expenditure and number of recipients in this programme group.
At the end of 1996, there were 96,107 recipients (88,986 widows and 7,121
widowers). The expenditure in 1996 was just under £360 million which represented an increase of 5.2 per cent over 1995.