Mr. John O'Sullivan:

It endeavours to deal with cases within six months but as the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General showed, there have been a number of difficulties in that regard. The briefing material shows that a number of steps are under way and one of the things it has done is to roll out a call-over process, which allows it to assign cases to dates much earlier in the process. There was a major change in the 2015 Act which allowed the tribunal to sit as a division of one person, where previously it had to sit as a three-person division. The tribunal has up to 28 members with a chairperson, who is a lawyer, and up to eight deputy chairpersons while the rest are ordinary members. The tribunal can also determine cases without an oral hearing and the tribunal is piloting work in this area as it is keen to pursue it. These measures are aimed at the backlogs. Many cases are heard within six months and the tribunal is already hearing cases from the 2017 batch. We accepted the recommendation in the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General in this regard. The tribunal is also improving its website to allow more online services.