The Department is committed to delivering the best possible service to its customers. In order to meet the challenge of increased volumes of new claims for its schemes, the department has embarked on a major programme of process redesign and modernisation, including the deployment of new computer systems. The deployment of new systems is a very resource intensive task and has, as a consequence, had a negative impact during the development and deployment phase on processing performance. Once the programme of deployment is fully completed I expect that performance will recover and improve.
As part of my department's Document, Record and Information Management (DRIM) programme and in tandem with Service Delivery Modernisation (SDM) projects underway for carer's allowance scheme, scanning of medical documents for a number of schemes including carer's allowance commenced in 2010. At the end of August 2011 scanning was extended to include carer's allowance application forms and associated documentation.
The DRIM programme is a key part of my department's ongoing change and modernisation programme. The rationale for the programme is to reduce the volume of paper documents used and stored in scheme areas by scanning documents, making the scanned images available online to staff and where appropriate, extracting data from scanned images for integration to ICT systems to facilitate automation of business processes. In order to address the high claim load and reduce the time taken to process claims resources in the carer's allowance area are being prioritised as far as possible to the reduction of the back logs. Additional resources are also being provided in the form of overtime working and temporary staff. However, it is expected to be a significant number of months before the backlog is reduced to an acceptable level.