Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

We decide on approximately 1.7 million claim applications per year. There are 25,000 appeals, so that is approximately 1% of the entire range of decisions that go to appeal. Looking within that, in a very significant proportion of the appeals the people making the appeal provide additional information which allows for a different decision to be made either by the deciding officer or the appeals officer. However, we have put very strong links in place to try and learn so that if there are process problems or misinterpretation problems, that will be fed back into the Department. We have what is called a decisions advisory officer in the Department which has a strong link with the appeals office, not on individual case level but to examine trends and practices and see what learning is available. That can be fed back into the training regimes for our deciding officers.