Joan Collins
Question:309. Deputy Joan Collins asked the Minister for Social Protection the costs to her Department to process and respond to a priority, an oral and a written parliamentary question. [16597/14]
View answerTuesday, 8 April 2014
Questions (309)
Written answers
The Department of Social Protection (DSP) has always been committed to being as transparent and helpful as possible to all members of the Oireachtas. In this regard the Department has set up dedicated enquiry telephone lines and specific email addresses for each section in the Department specifically for the purpose of dealing with queries from members of the Oireachtas in relation to individual social welfare cases/claims. This also helps reduce the costs of answering pqs.
DSP receives the highest number of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) of all Government departments. In 2013, approximately 10,500 PQs were tabled to the department. Over 1900 pqs were transferred to other Government Departments leaving approximately 8,550 actually finally tabled to DSP. Of these approximately 4,460 were withdrawn and 4,089 were answered. Of the pqs answered, approximately 3,700 were written and 350 were Priority/Oral PQs.
The vast majority of PQs, some 70% of those tabled to the Department refer to the status of claims by individuals in relation to the variety of schemes administered by the Department.
A practice of withdrawing PQs has been in place for over 20 years and has assisted the Department to cope with the large volume of PQs it receives annually. This practice is in place, generally, in relation to PQs on individual social welfare claims and not policy matters. The Department provides the Deputy with the relevant information in relation to the individual query and in a majority of cases subsequently confirms this information in writing. In general, Deputies find this service helpful as they are still receiving a written response to the query.
There are approximately 600 staff members of varying grades involved at some level in distributing, answering and submitting PQs for approval across the Department. The length of time spent on dealing with PQs can vary from a few minutes to a number of hours per week. As the processing of answering PQs is undertaken as part of the normal day to day work of the individual sections within the Department it is not possible to readily isolate the costs of processing PQs from the overall administrative costs of the Department.
In 2008, a Government Department estimated that the cost of answering a PQ was approximately €200 per PQ. However, there is still an amount of work involved in withdrawing a PQ i.e. contact with the Deputy and Oireachtas Questions’ Office, provision of a written response etc. This can be quite time-consuming on both the part of the DSP staff member and the TD’s office if telephone contact cannot be made easily either with the TD or the Oireachtas Questions Office. Thus it is assumed that the cost of answering a written PQ is marginally more expensive than the cost of withdrawing a written PQ. Based on the €200 estimate the cost to DSP of handling the approximate 3,700 written PQs tabled in 2013 would be approximately €740,000. The cost of priority/oral PQs would exceed the cost of written PQs as the level of information required for the response far exceeds the information required for a written PQ but even at a cost of €200 per PQ this would equate to some €70,000 for 2013.