I propose to take Questions Nos. 567 and 568 together.
The Public Services Card (PSC) has been introduced to enable individuals gain access to public services more efficiently and with a minimum of duplication of effort, while at the same time preserving their privacy to the maximum extent possible. The PSC is designed to replace other cards within the public sector such as the Free Travel Pass and the Social Services Card (SSC) of this Department and to make it easy for providers of public services to verify the identity of customers.
Approx. 615,000 PSCs have been produced to date. These include c.126,000 Free Travel variants. PSCs are produced by a managed service provider, Biometric Card Services Limited, at a facility in Bray, Co. Wicklow. The Department’s Card Management Section deals with enquiries from customers who report that their PSC or SSC did not work at the nominated Post Office. In general, there are three reasons why swiping a card in the Post Office may fail to work, including, a record for the cardholder does not exist on the An Post file, the magnetic stripe becomes faulty over time (e.g. scratched, proximity to other magnetic stripes, wear and tear etc.) or the card reader is faulty.
To date, of the total number of PSCs issued, only 310 have been returned by customers as “not working”. However, 87 of these functioned correctly when subsequently tested by Card Management Section. The remaining 223 (0.04% of all cards produced) did not work when tested. These included cards that were faulty and cards that were damaged. In all cases, the returned PSC was revoked and the person issued with a new one. It is evident from these figures that there is almost a negligible level of faulty cards. The Department endeavours to ensure that cards issued are of the highest quality, and as part of this ongoing quality control, An Post recently tested a sample of live cards in three separate locations and all read successfully without any failure. Additionally, a number of these cards were swiped over 100 times each and no failures were recorded.