Alan Shatter
Ceist:20 Mr. Shatter asked the Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs the average number of weeks to decide a claim of unmarried mothers' claimants and free scheme claimants in each of the past three years. [15156/01]
Written Answers. - Social Welfare Benefits.
In the case of one parent family payments around 18,000 claims a year – equivalent to about 350 per week – are being received at present. The average number of weeks to decide a claim in the case of unmarried claimants was seven weeks in 1998, 8.6 weeks in 1999 and ten weeks in 2000.
The time taken to process individual claims varies significantly having regard to the difficulty or otherwise in establishing the circumstances in each case. It should be noted, however, that a large majority of applicants are in receipt of another social welfare payment while their claim is being processed. Such payment will normally continue until entitlement to one-parent family payment is determined.
Every effort is being made to process applications as quickly as possible and to minimise the time during which applicants receive these alternative forms of support. It is intended to devolve the administration of the one-parent family payment to the Department's network of local offices around the country. This will assist in reducing claim processing times, through closer linkage with the local investigative officer network. Plans for localisation of the scheme are being drawn up and a localisation pilot project in one local office has commenced.
In the case of free schemes the average time to award an electricity allowance or a telephone allowance was 4.8 weeks in 1998, 3.7 weeks in 1999 and 5.6 weeks in 2000. The scope of the free schemes has been greatly extended in the last two budgets. In 2000 the Government extended free scheme entitlement to all persons over 75 and, in 2001, to all persons over 70. It is expected as a result that an additional 80,000 claims will be processed this year, almost doubling the normal annual new claim intake.
An increase of this order in the level of new claims inevitably impacts to some degree on the normal claims turnaround. Additional staff and overtime resources have been applied by the Department to deal with the extra work volumes in 2000 and further resources are being assigned to deal with the extra claim intake in 2001.
In the normal course, my Department would expect to process 70% of claims to the schemes in question in seven weeks. With the assignment of additional staff, normal response rates will be restored over the next few months. I assure the Deputy that every effort is made to process all claims as quickly as possible and that any delay will not result in a loss of entitlements to the people concerned.