Ms Teresa Leonard:

I will start with the Senator's question about the child dependant payment. He referred to someone who has two child dependants and is receiving just €203. It would probably be better for the person in question to apply for jobseeker's allowance directly and to claim for the children through this allowance. As PUP is a flat-rate benefit, with one rate per individual, there is no rate for dependants. I suggest that the Senator contacts me with the details of that person, and we will send out the proper application forms for jobseeker's allowance. The person in question could possibly claim for the children, and maybe for a spouse or partner. There are other payments to which he or she could be entitled.

The genuinely seeking work rule is there. I am sorry that I caused confusion in my first answer in respect of how the rule applies to PUP. We are not actually pushing it at this point in time because of the actual climate. We are not forcing people who are temporarily out of work towards the genuinely seeking work rule right now. The committee should recognise that the Department is really stretched in supporting the PUP. We have staff all over the organisation who are backing up that particular scheme, and are working on it along with their other tasks to ensure it is paid promptly every week to all recipients. There is not the facility to implement the genuinely seeking work rule effectively, efficiently or thoroughly at this point, for numerous reasons. First, the climate is such that it may not be appropriate. Second, the resources required to implement it limit how much action we can take on it at this time. Nonetheless, the rule exists.

It is similar to a jobseeker's scheme. Just to be clear on that, a jobseeker's scheme has a genuinely seeking work, GSW, requirement to it.

As for the 90% online applications for PUP, PUP has been very successful online. I overlooked a question that the previous Deputy asked about why one had to send an email to get the form. We started out initially with a form for PUP in mid-March of this year - at this point, it seems like last year - and within three weeks we had an online application process in place. The take-up of that was substantial from day one to the point that in the resurgence in the past number of weeks, we primarily took away the paper application and encouraged people to go online. The paper application was available but the percentage of people who used it, as the committee can see, is very low.

We are working in the Department on putting all our schemes online. It takes a bit of time to get through them all because we have over 80 schemes in the organisation but this year we have made considerable progress in our presence online and the availability to our customers of online services. We will continue with that. It is part of our objective.