Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will take Deputy Butler's question first and then move on to the others. We took roughly 1,000 staff who had formerly worked in the HSE, either as community welfare officers or as staff assisting community welfare officers. When that happened we took over approximately 700 locations from which they provided community welfare services, often for one or two hours a week in 700 different sites around the country. We want to modernise the service. First, all these officials would have been linked to a general principal office, maybe in a neighbouring large town or a regional headquarters. Down the years, if a large number of people were out on the road a lot of the time, it was difficult to contact them, as Deputies know. Officials were showing up in relatively small villages or at crossroads or in old doctors' dispensaries. I believe this practice dates back to the days of what were once called relieving officers, 40, 50 or 60 years ago, even back to the time of British rule. We are bringing them to the large villages and towns but all the time ensuring that people's distance from a significant service is maintained. It must be within a reasonable distance, the kind of distance people might travel for their pension. We have to do this for two reasons: first, it allows us to give more service hours to more people because more of the clients are concentrated in large villages and towns; and second, those officials are available for a longer period. Normally when we make these changes we make a huge effort to advise all public representatives and we advise the local community and put up notices.

If resources permitted I have no doubt people would prefer the old system, but one community officer travelling a round trip of 40 miles to spend one hour at a centre where one person shows up represents a lot of resources. If we could move that meeting place to the nearest large village or town it would enable more people to be seen. Due to the numbers employed, the restrictions about which I spoke and the reductions in the Department's budget, this is an area in which we can try to achieve greater efficiency. That is why we are doing this, and we will continue that process until we can get a more efficient and better service. The second issue is that we are then in a position, as we develop the Intreo offices, to have, for instance, a community welfare officer - we have not reached this level yet - available on-site to deal, for instance, with rent allowance and rent supplement, because approximately 86,000 receive rent supplement and they deal with a community welfare officer. We are trying to improve the quality of services and make the best use of scarce resources.

Deputy O'Dea asked how many staff had been transferred. I can get him the exact figures, but approximately 1,000 staff transferred from the HSE - they were community welfare officers - and approximately 700 staff came from the old FÁS employment services. With them we took the community employment schemes. These schemes employ almost 1,400 supervisors or assistant supervisors. We also created several new schemes, JobBridge and Tús being the best known, and we are creating a social employment service for people through the local authorities, which is making progress. The county councils are getting ready to go ahead with that service. Approximately 1,700 civil servants have come directly into the Department and the local employment service, LES, is also coming under the employment service wing. That is a large number of extra people and services in which more people are engaged indirectly and funded by the Department.