Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I refer to a related point on correspondence. The Chairman touched on this earlier but I missed the opportunity to comment on it. I refer to correspondence item No. 3A.2 from the Department of Social Protection. Question No. 4 follows from an issue I raised about providing more up-to-date information regarding the number of people in receipt of social welfare payments who turned up when they were asked to turn up. At the meeting, we discussed this and the Department suggested between 70% and 80% of those who had been asked to turn up to an interview did so. This was a gigantic improvement on previous figures. The change that happened is that there was more sanction introduced because people would lose a portion of payments if they did not turn up.

I asked for more up-to-date information on that because my recollection is that the figures it gave us were for last summer when the scheme was introduced and it has not supplied that information to us yet and it is after Easter. I would appreciate if we could contact it to reiterate the need for that to be supplied to us because it is now April and we should have more up-to-date information on how that is working.