The Department administers a variety of schemes which have a weekly and monthly payment cycle. For the most part the delays experienced related to customers on weekly payment cycles who are payable by cheque.
On 6 January 2010 An Post was unable to collect 27,000 social welfare cheques from the Department's Dublin computer centre due to adverse weather conditions. The customers mainly affected were in receipt of illness benefit, supplementary welfare allowance and family income supplement, with small additional numbers for rent supplement, mortgage interest supplement, disability allowance, jobseeker's and one parent family payments. The cheques were collected early the following morning and all Dublin payments were made on schedule that afternoon but payments outside Dublin were delivered one day late.
My Department issued a press release and included details on the Department's website informing customers of the delay and advising them to contact their Community Welfare Officer if they were experiencing financial difficulties as a result of the delay.
Throughout the period of bad weather, An Post made every effort to ensure the delivery of social welfare customer cheques. In cases where deliveries of customer cheques were affected by the weather, An Post put in place a cheque collection facility which enabled customers to collect their cheques from their local mail delivery office. There is no data available on the numbers of customers who used this facility.
It should be noted that the non-collection of cheques on 6th January represented less that nine per cent of supplementary welfare monthly cheque transactions and six per cent of illness benefit transactions. Over ninety per cent of transactions, paid electronically through their bank or financial institution or with their Social Services Card in An Post, were unaffected.