Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will put a few quick questions before concluding this session. I have a general observation to make about the Department and it is nothing to do with the Secretary General. It is a historical issue. I will put my question by way of giving examples. If we ask the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection for the number of people in receipt of jobseeker's allowance, it can provide that information every week. If we ask the HSE for the number of medical cards it has issued, it can provide an answer today, tomorrow or next week. It knows how many medical cards have been issued and cancelled. In terms of the Revenue Commissioners and PAYE, everybody can have their tax credits up-to-date on a weekly basis and it is all done online in real time. When we come to Mr. McCarthy's Department, and this is not personal to him, I ask him to address the historical deficit, as I would call it, in that regard. He cannot do it now; it is a long-term project. We ask for the number of people on the housing lists and the Department produces a list once a year. Imagine if the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection only had information once a year on the number of claimants for all its schemes or the HSE only had information the number of people on medical cards once or year. Imagine if the Revenue said it would issue one tax clearance or tax credit certificate to last for 12 months. Mr. McCarthy's Department is almost medieval in terms of its statistics system. He should not take this personally. Every other Department is up to date. The Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government gets its figures from local authorities. I cannot understand why, in this day and age, there is not a standardised system in the Department across every local authority. Let us say the Department compiles its housing list in the middle of the summer and has 70,000 people on it. It then processes 400 cases a week in the different local authorities and 26 people are taken off the list because they have been allocated housing. It is beyond comprehension in this century that the Department does not have a list setting out the figures for each local authority every week. That should be available every day if the system was up to date. I find it strange. The Department is very busy but we are used to people having up-to-date information. Even the letter we got today in response to the question on net need refers to exclusions, for example, duplicate applications, those already in receipt of social housing support, which is one of the issues we have been talking about, or who are on a transfer list. The next sentence states: "While data is not available on the numbers of households under each of the above headings ...". If officials from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection came in here and made comments like that, we would be amazed. As a long-term plan, the flow of information is extraordinary. Mr. McCarthy might want to respond-----