The payments relating to disabled children administered by the Department include domiciliary care allowance and carer's allowance. Domiciliary care allowance is a payment to the parent or carer of a child who has a disability so severe that it requires the child to need care and attention or supervision substantially in excess of another child of the same age. The child must be likely to require this level of care and attention for at least 12 months. Every application is assessed by one of the Department's Medical Assessors. An individual medical opinion, based on the information submitted by the applicant in support of their claim, is offered in each case. The deciding officer then makes a decision having considered the medical opinion provided and all the other information available.
Applications for domiciliary care allowance are processed by date of receipt. It currently takes approximately eight weeks to process an application, which is in line with target. Entitlement to carer's allowance is based on satisfying medical, means and residency conditions. In determining entitlement to the allowance there are, in certain cases, unavoidable time lags involved in making the necessary investigations and enquiries to enable accurate decisions to be made. Delays can also arise if people applying for the allowance are not in a position to supply all the necessary information at the time of submitting their claim. Carer's allowance applications are currently taking approximately 12 weeks to process. A total of 3,815 applications were registered in the first three months of 2011 and 3,883 were processed in the same period, there are currently 4,509 applications awaiting a decision.
The main reason for the deterioration in the processing time for carer's allowance is due to staff being engaged in work on a major service modernisation project involving the development of IT functionality and associated business reorganisation. This work involves a significant level of data clean-up and related work to ensure the 51,000 existing carer's allowance customers can be successfully transferred onto the new IT platform. It is anticipated that the new system will introduce significant processing efficiencies and a quicker and more responsive service to the customer. I am pleased to say the modernisation project is currently on target for delivery in July 2011. The staff and other resources available to the Department are regularly reviewed having regard to the workload and competing priorities and the position continues to be kept under review.