That kind of thing makes a debate like this almost impossible in terms of bringing the self-employed, including the farming community, into the insurance net on a rational basis. It makes it almost impossible but the opportunism being displayed on this issue, as was displayed in relation to, for example, other and more current issues, leads one to despair at times of politicians acting responsibly in facing up to very difficult issues. These difficult issues must be tackled head on if we are to have a proper system of social insurance and if we are to effect the necessary reforms. I appeal especially to the self-employed in this regard. By coming within the social insurance framework they, together with all others covered by social insurance, would be entitled in their own right to benefits. This would eliminate the need for means investigation which very often is a basic part of the difficulties that arise but which is part of the general social assistance support system. If the self-employed join the full social insurance system they will gain immeasurably in the quality of service, in the range of risks covered and in the level of income support received. In addition they would save a good deal of money in terms of the heavy cost of private insurance arrangements.
We in Social Welfare frequently can deliver to the people a system of social insurance which in terms of administration would be almost one-third of what private insurance might cost.
In a paper by Dr. Gerard Hughes which was published in February last by the ESRI, he concluded that:
... the average contributor to the State pension schemes would find it extremely difficult to get a rate of return approaching the yield on State pension contributions and if the structure of the scheme is unchanged it will give very good value for money to insured workers...
He was examining the particular position of employees who were insured for old age (contributory) pension from its inception in 1961, but in my view the general value-for-money point remains for all contributors to the social welfare system.
The Government will be giving serious consideration to the establishment of effective monitoring and regulation of the occupational pensions sector. There have been a number of worrying cases recently of company pension funds being diverted to prop up ailing businesses, often leaving workers without any pension entitlement if the firm collapses; this adds further trauma to the prospect of redundancy. More generally, there is a need to develop safer funding methods, give greater provision to workers in small firms, to provide for transfer of pension rights if workers change jobs and to give better guarantees of occupational pension indexation in the future.
It is clear that the occupational pensions industry, while generally giving very responsible guidance to companies, is not equipped exclusively to deal with the sort of problem issues which I have raised. This suggests the need for a greater overseeing role by the State, possibly in the form of a joint regulatory body representative of the Government, the pensions industry, employer and trade union interests.
The question of effective action against poverty will be elaborated on later on by my colleague. I do not wish to intrude unduly on such a short debate.
One of the key criteria in social welfare is the issue of whether the support is reaching the people most in need. It is a fundamental requirement of social welfare that it should be able to identify, reach and support people in poverty. The redistribution of resources involved in this process should then help to remove relative poverty from our society.
In my view no one is in a position to say that our system of social welfare today is fully meeting this basic poverty-oriented objective. The system is providing for many income support needs, but either because of incomplete take-up of schemes or because the administrative structures are not sufficiently flexible, many people in our community still live in poverty. The Commission on Social Welfare will, I hope, produce criteria for identifying and meeting subsistence needs. In parallel with the commission's work, the Government has moved to reorganise some of its services to deal with particular low-income needs.
The family income supplement was implemented and there are now fewer than 6,000 families receiving support by way of this scheme. We did estimate that more families would be applying for participation in the scheme. To date there have been more than 10,000 applications. The question of whether there are families who either are not aware of the scheme or who have not bothered to apply is one that we have difficulty in assessing. A sum of £7 million has been provided for the scheme in 1985. So far as the Department are concerned, the scheme is fully available to all families who think they may qualify. It has been advertised extensively in the media.
We are going ahead with the introduction of the child benefit scheme and hope to introduce that scheme next year. It will help to neutralise the relative positions of families at work and unemployed by giving a much larger monthly payment for children regardless of the employment status of the family.
The strongest influences on the "poverty trap" are the arbitrary cut-off points for medical card eligibility and the income tax thresholds. The Commission on Social Welfare has been asked specifically to look at the interaction between the tax and welfare codes. However, the solutions proposed by NESC, involving the tapering of medical card entitlement and income levies, would lead us down the road to an even more complex system, in an attempt to solve what may be a theoretical rather than a real problem in that regard.
As regards direct action on poverty, the Government are moving to establish a new poverty agency, and as Deputies are probably aware, the Bill to implement this is now at the Committee Stage in the Seanad. Once the legislation is approved by the Oireachtas, the Government will set up the new agency quickly. A sum of £1 million has been provided in this year's Estimates for their work. I hope to have the Bill from the Seanad before the summer recess.
The moneys for the voluntary agencies are being distributed. A large number of applications have been received. There is a substantial increase in this area — from £500,000 last year to £650,000 this year.
There have been many complaints particularly in recent times about delays in processing social welfare claims and appeals and in replying to inquiries and representations.
I would point out that in any given week the Department make payment to 1.25 million clients and deal with about 25,000 new claimants. In the disability benefit section alone, more than 70,000 payments per week are made and once a claim is set up which mainly for statutory reasons takes two weeks on average, payments are made on about 90 per cent of medical certificates on the day they arrive in the Department. When one considers the complexities of the various social welfare schemes, the various conditions which have to be satisfied to become entitled to payment and the various inquiries and investigations which have to be made to ensure that all these conditions are satisfied in each individual case, the times taken by the Department in putting benefit into payment in most cases are not unreasonable.
My colleague and I are actually aware that many claimants are entirely or almost entirely dependent on social welfare benefit for their means of support and that any delay no matter how short can be a cause of concern and indeed hardship. In this regard where there are protracted delays, claimants have recourse to local community welfare officers and I should like to pay a particular tribute to these officers for the magnificent work they are doing in coping with their difficult task.
There is an obligation to ensure that each individual case is dealt with in strict accordance with the legislation and its many requirements. Allegations are from time to time made against the Department that through leniency or other shortcomings, it allows payments to be made in cases where entitlement does not arise. The much over-rated incidence of some persons who improperly claim unemployment payments while working is an obvious example but there are many others particularly in relation to meanstested schemes where the amount of social welfare assistance is directly related to the persons income, a matter which is often not easily measured and which in all cases requires detailed examination. It is sometimes conveniently overlooked that while claimants have a statutory right to payment, which the Department is most anxious to meet, there are corresponding statutory duties on the Department to ensure the proper administration of its schemes.
In recent years there has been a tremendous growth in the volume of the Department's workload. In the areas of unemployment payments the numbers have increased by over 50 per cent since mid-1981: over the whole range of departmental services the volume of claims in payment has increased by almost one-fifth since then.
Deputies are familiar with the problems arising from the public service embargo on the staffing side and great reliance has been placed on improving the overall management of the various schemes and services and by pushing ahead at all possible speed with a large programme of computerisation which is designed greatly to increase the efficiency of operations while at the same time easing the heavy workload on the staff.
As regards media comment and the way things are reported superficially at times I have been accused of spending £500,000 a year on consultancies. A great deal of consultancy work is done in instituting various schemes in the Department. The Department have the resources for doing the consultancy work necessary for the introduction of the various programmes of computerisation. We have an outstanding computer staff and they have worked miracles in terms of easing the very heavy workload of the staff while at the same time coping with the public service embargo.
There has been an enormous amount of superficial comment made in regard to decentralisation. It was suggested that if the Department were split up or regionalised — all fashionable parlance — we would do away with the problems being experienced by claimants who have difficulty in having their claims or inquiries processed as quickly as they would wish. These are very attractive solutions but in reality they ignore the fact that the Department discharge an enormous amount of work directly to the people at close level. For example, children's allowances, all pensions and about one third of all unemployment payments are paid out in local post offices. In a small country with a population of 3.5 million the suggestion that we should have a number of offices all over the country, making local decisions, would make for organisation mayhem. No unemployed person has need to travel more than six miles to collect his or her payment. In a country where the population is widely dispersed, particularly in rural areas, our network of offices works with considerable effect.
The rapid growth in the Department's computer system will, in the future, give a greater degree of flexibility in this regard and will allow more cases to be handled at local level. As regards computerisation we can only go as fast as resources permit but central records, disability benefits and children's allowances are on computer as well as several pension schemes. The facilities are being extended as fast as resources and management will allow. In many respects it is now possible for people to go into a local employment exchange or pension office and give their RSI number. There is an immediate print-out on the visual display unit to indicate when the last payment was paid and when the next payment is due. The money can be monitored effectively in that way.
As regards disability benefit, in an effort to further improve the service I have with the co-operation of the staff recently introduced a new centralised telephone query service for disability benefit claimants at our headquarter's office in Aras Mhic Dhiarmada. Up to now all telephone queries were routed to the staff in the section dealing with the claim under inquiry. A special team of 14 staff has now been assembled and assigned the task of dealing with all the telephone queries, including following up and ringing back the claimant in relation to inquiries which need the attention of other officers and cannot be dealt with on the spot. As Deputies know from experience there were individual lines to the sections. The interruption of work and the duplication of activity posed considerable difficulty on an already overstretched staff. The call back service has an important new dimension. Staff have been especially assigned, with no other duty, to follow up and ring back claimants who cannot be fully dealt with during their initial call. Special arrangements have been made to write immediately to persons without telephones.
Seven income telephone extensions from the main switchboard at Aras Mhic Dhiarmada have been made available to these staff together with eight video terminals connected directly to the benefits computer system. Three direct telephone lines have been provided for ringing back claimants in relation to matters which are not cleared on the spot.
The new system has been in operation for the past three weeks and 500 to 600 queries have been received a day. I thank the trade unions concerned particularly the Civil Service and Public Service staff unions for their exceptional co-operation in dealing with the running of this system. The experience has been that about 80 per cent of the queries have been dealt with immediately and a call-back has been necessary in only about 20 per cent of the cases. The system has already achieved a significant reduction in the time taken to service calls from the persons ringing up with queries about their benefit claims.
As Deputies are aware this type of service has been available to them in two special direct telephone lines for some time now. Two further lines have been in use for calls from community information centres and the National Social Service Board. About 100 calls a week in all are dealt with on these four lines. I understand that this service has proved satisfactory and useful to Deputies and others and, based on this experience, I am pleased that we have been able to extend the arrangement at this stage to the whole of the disability benefit area.
The Department of Social Welfare, in common with many public service bodies nowadays, are finding themselves under increasing pressure to meet higher standards at a time when there has been a huge increase in the sheer volume of their business, more management and control demands are being made on them and their resources are limited. Some of their problems arise from the number and complexity of their schemes and services the terms and conditions for which are in most cases laid down by statute and are not open to any real flexibility of interpretation. I expect that the Commission of Social Welfare will have some useful pointers in this regard.
The very complex problems of achieving and maintaining a reasonable standard of service in the circumstances I have been describing are often underestimated. Much has been said in that context about the piecemeal nature of the present system and the need for simplification. I agree in general terms with those sentiments, but I would make two points. The first is that rationalisation and simplification are not necessarily the same thing. The second is that simplification is not a costless exercise. Any substantial simplification of the conditions applied for qualification for social welfare payments will change the difficult balance which must be struck between meeting real need expeditiously and ensuring that the system is not so loose that significant amounts of money are not wasted on those who do not have a genuine need or right to income maintenance. It will, for that reason, be difficult to bring about a major simplification of the social welfare services without either dis-entitling some of those who at present qualify for payments or, alternatively, bringing in many people who do not at present qualify.
Those remarks are not intended as objections to simplification, far from it. I am simply saying that simplification must be approached seriously and not regarded as a simple and uncomplicated panacea for present problems.
I have resisted making general promises in relation to social welfare. We stayed within our budgets for 1982-83, 1984-85 and we provided in the national plan for increases in our budget provisions for 1986-87. I met a group of trade union members the other day and they wanted all redundancy payments disregarded for assessment for unemployment assistance. They said that Fianna Fáil Deputies had told them there would be no problem in that regard. I do not know if they believed them but I do not make promises like that as I see no point in it.
With regard to the recent manifesto issued by my party, I did not say I would give medical cards to all old age pensioners. For instance, a bank manager in receipt of a pension from the bank and also a contributory old age pension would not have an automatic entitlement to a medical card. Fianna Fáil have made promises in this regard despite the fact that in October 1982 they decided to change all that but sat on it during the course of the general election because they were terrified of antagonising the electorate.
This year, we have to find a sum of £580 million for unemployment related expenditure and the money is provided from income tax and excise duty and a very substantial portion is borrowed abroad and domestically to pay for it. We have delivered more than any other European country in spite of the recession which has lasted far longer and bitten much deeper than any Member could have anticipated. I regularly meet my colleagues, Ministers for Health and Social Security, and when I see what they are obliged to do in the context of their national budgets and provision for social security, we can hold our heads up high and say that, despite the recession, we have indexed our social welfare payments and, in terms of long term payments, have gone above the rate of inflation. In the UK and Northern Ireland, pay-related benefits have been abolished and in much wealthier countries pensions have been reduced. When one realises that for every 1,000 people on the live register, we must provide about £2.5 million, we see how important this Estimate is. I shall conclude now as it is appropriate that as many Members as possible should have an opportunity to contribute to this debate. Accordingly, I commend the Estimate to the House and the Minister of State, Deputy Pattison, who has specific responsibility for social welfare will deal with the issues raised.
