A new approach to managing the delivery of social welfare services at local level is being implemented by my Department. The first stage of the improved service involved the establishment of regional management centres and a phased broadening of the role of my Department's employment exchanges. The regional centres are based at Cork, Dublin, Dundalk, Galway, Limerick, Longford, Sligo and Waterford. Each centre is under the control of a regional manager who is based locally and who is supported by a management team and a network of area managers also based in the locality.
Having a more comprehensive service available locally will mean that employment exchanges, which traditionally dealt with unemployment payments, will be gradually transformed into complete one-stop-shops for social welfare purposes. In these new style centres pensioners, lone parents, unemployed people and families who are out of work through illness will receive the social welfare services, advice and any information which they may require.
The new regional management structure will mean: one-stop-shops for all social welfare customers; better services for employers; better controls to eliminate abuse of PRSI and social welfare schemes and new supportive relationships with the voluntary and community groups working in the area. To service this new structure, 45 additional staff were provided. Their grades are as follows: one principal officer; four assistant principal officers; six higher executive officers; 12 executive officers; eight staff officers; four clerical officers and ten clerical assistants.
In addition, several hundred locally based staff have been regraded. This change means that a more flexible approach to responding to the evolving needs of social welfare clients is now being implemented. It allowed existing staff to be deployed to assist the extra staff assigned in 1991 and each regional centre now has a full-time team in full operation.
Enhanced quality of services will require the continuing and increasing use of information technology. My Department is one of the most advanced public sector users of computer technology in Europe. Almost all local offices of the Department have access to a central computer system so that client information, in respect of people who call to my Department's offices, is readily accessible. Almost one-third, 14,000, of all weekly medical certificates for disability benefit purposes are now being processed locally and the extension of this facility will be accelerated by the new local structures.
A programme of upgrading the social welfare office premises is also under way. In recent years a total of 17 new offices have been provided and a further ten have been extensively refurbished. New offices are also planned for a number of other centres. My aim is to ensure that people transact their business with my Department in privacy, with dignity and in comfortable surroundings. This is being done in conjunction with the restructuring of the provision of services.