Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy's first question was on the difference between budgets from different years. While it is only a small amount, €14 million, one would have to reflect on the huge savings that the Department has thankfully made because we have 200,000 people now working who were, for the last years, reliant on a weekly payment from the State. That is a significant amount of money and it has been reinvested to improve the lives of thousands of other people by increasing their weekly payments, albeit by a very small amount, by improving our making-work-pay structures, by increasing family income supplement, FIS, the thresholds of qualified child increase, QCI, and the thresholds for lone parents and their ability to make more money on a weekly basis. We have saved money by the huge reduction on the live register and people will note that we have ambitions to reduce it significantly again this year. All of that money gets reinvested and I am hopeful that we would get more money to have a debate on next year to figure out what we are going to do and how we can best spend it. There has been significant reinvestment in other areas of the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection because of the reductions in the live register.

The Deputy asked me a question about non-contributory payments. We have an ambition in the Department that all systems and schemes should have a 12-week turnaround. On appeal, some of those have delays because they are very complex and also because some people tend to hold back information from an original application until they get to appeal which does not help the turnaround times at all. We have an ambition to try to turn around applications for all schemes within 12 weeks. We suffer peaks and troughs for different schemes. The two schemes that are experiencing longer delays at the moment are domiciliary care allowance, DCA, and our non-contributory pension applications because there has been a huge increase in those applications. I am not sure why. One reflection on the DCA is that the medical card came on stream this year and more people became aware of its value. There is not a real reason why there should be a huge increase in non-contributory applications but there is. Staff are reflecting on it and we are well aware that, in certain instances, we retrain staff from other Departments and move them. There is nobody in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection without a workload. We are trying to be responsible and reflective on where we have peaks and troughs. I am aware of it and we are consciously and actively monitoring and looking at it. We want to hit that 12-week target for all our payments.

I will address the Deputy's last question before I go back to partial capacity. The targets for anti-fraud measures are in and around the same every year. We do not get more or less ambitious to try to capture money that is being directed at schemes or people that should not necessarily be in receipt of it. Our ambition is to capture in and around that amount of money every single year. To answer the Deputy's question about last year's anti-fraud campaign, I will not entirely be in a position to be able to reflect on it until around the middle of next year.

That is because it takes 12 to 18 months to take a referral, assess it, carry out an inspection, chase the information and if there is untoward behaviour taking place, bring forward charges and close the matter off. The ratio is that nearly half of reports received in the Department are substantiated and result in an overpayment being stopped and-or a summons, fine or, much worse, prosecution in court. This year's anti-fraud campaign trebled the number of reports. I am hopeful that, next year, I will be able to sit here with the committee, notwithstanding everyone's views about it or whether they like the method, and say "It worked and it gave us more". I will not be able to do that until next year and it may be that others will be proven right and I will be proven wrong. However, we will see when we have that conversation next year. Our ambition continues to be to stop people receiving payments they should not get in order that we can direct the money involved to people who should get it. That is not going to change.

I turn to partial capacity. There are no changes to the scheme itself. I was not 100% sure of that but it has just been confirmed to me. The scheme is no different-----