Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 26 January 2012
3Deputy Joan Collins asked the Minister for Social Protection her views on the continuous delay in processing applications for social welfare benefits and allowances and in particular the average of six months for processing applicants for carer’s allowance and benefit. [4749/12]
View answerThe Department is committed to delivering the best possible service to its customers. Processing times vary across schemes, depending on the differing qualification criteria. At the end of 2011, there were almost 52,000 people in receipt of carer's allowance from my Department at a total cost of almost €500 million. Approximately 22,000 of these were getting half-rate carer's allowance in addition to another social welfare payment.
The average time taken to award a carer's allowance application was 17 weeks in the third quarter to the end of September 2011, and not the six months quoted in this question. Due to the introduction of a new claims processing system for carer's allowance, figures for the last quarter of 2011 are unavailable as new claims are being processed on the new system while older claims are still being processed on the old system. For carer's benefit, the average time to award a claim in 2011 was ten weeks.
In order to meet the challenge of increased volumes of new claims for its schemes, the Department has embarked on a major programme of process redesign and modernisation, including the development and roll-out of new computer systems in the invalidity pension, carer's allowance and disability allowance areas. This roll-out of new systems is a very resource intensive task and consequently has had a negative impact on the claims processing performance for carer's allowance where the project is currently underway. Once the programme of roll-outs is fully completed, I expect that performance will recover and improve. In the meantime the Department is taking all steps available to augment resources in order to process claims.
Additional information not given on the floor of the House.
For example, since May 2008, 900 staff have been assigned to my Department, mainly through the transfer and redeployment of staff from other Departments. In addition, the Department has recruited new medical assessors and appointed additional staff to the Social Welfare Appeals Office. The Department also makes judicious use of overtime and employs temporary staff as appropriate to address particular service issues as they arise.
In order to offer a more streamlined, efficient and integrated service to customers, the Department is also undergoing a process of intensive planning and organisational change in establishing the new National Employment and Entitlements Service. The establishment of the NEES under the management of my Department brings together the community welfare service, the employment services and community employment programmes of FÁS, the rural social scheme and community services programme from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the redundancy and insolvency schemes from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.
It is my intention that the NEES will integrate all employment and benefit support services in a single delivery unit. This new service will provide a coherent integrated and more personalised service to customers and will help minimise the duplication that characterised services which were provided separately in the past.
I hear what the Minister is saying, but our experience in dealing with these claims is as outlined in the question. We are dealing with cases going back to July 2011 for the carer's allowance. It is not good enough that people have wait around that long to get clarification on whether they are entitled to the allowance or not. People have to get credit union loans to keep themselves going, while waiting for the approval or non-approval of the allowance to come through. It is the same for invalidity pensions. A person goes through an application for an invalidity pension and is refused. The review then takes 12 weeks and if that does not succeed there is then a six month wait for an appeal. That totals nearly 18 months for somebody waiting to find out whether or not he or she is entitled to an invalidity pension. That is not good enough.
When will this roll-out happen? The current situation cannot continue and something has to be done.
The Department's document record and information management programme is being rolled out, in tandem with what is called service delivery modernisation. That has been underway for a number of different claims. The scanning of medical documents in the social welfare services office in Longford started in November 2010. At the beginning of September 2011, scanning was extended to include carer's allowance application forms and associated documentation. This is part of a very large modernisation process and is ongoing at the moment. We hope to have large elements of it fully completed in a relatively short period of time. We have allocated extra resources. After I became Minister, I appointed extra appeal officers. Extra work has also been provided for.
The Deputy must understand that the volume of applications has risen very significantly. This scheme has grown very dramatically in terms of the number of applications that have been received, both for the carer's allowance and for the half-rate carer's allowance. We are trying to improve the systems to provide a better service.
I do not accept that. The volumes are up, which means that these people are saving the State huge amounts of money. It is imperative that these are put into place as quickly as possible. Is the Government continuing with the clientelism that we all hated with the last Government, where people had to go to Deputies who had a hotline to get through to a particular area? This Government has promised to move away from the failed politics we have had in recent years.
Since I became Minister, I have asked the staff of the Department to provide a series of information seminars in the AV room for Deputies and Senators and the staff of all political parties about the Department's hotlines for Members. These are not based on party politics. They are for every Member of either House who has been elected, and for their staff. The feedback from Members on the work by the departmental staff is very positive.
The staff are great.
A significant number of applications fails in this and other areas because they are incomplete. The quality of the information that is submitted or the totality of the information submitted is not complete.
It is not getting the-----
Let me continue. As carer's allowance is based on a medical assessment, the information has to satisfy not the clerical staff in the Department but the medical staff who are making the decisions. Once the changes I have spoken about are complete, we will need to look at the quality of the information provided at the initial application date, and I have already had discussions with the medical staff in the Department about this. If that information could be provided, I am sure that the number of preliminary refusals could be cut significantly.
Question No. 4 taken with Question No. 2.
Question No. 5 taken with Question No. 1.
