Mr. David Delaney:

To give the Chair some assurances on the tech savvy piece or the ability of some applicants to engage with technology, all of the video link interviews are actually conducted in the IPO and fully supported by staff in the IPO. It is the case that no customer is expected or asked to provide their own device or be able to engage with technology. It is all supported for them. That is a significant overhead for us but it means that we have built the system to cater for the most vulnerable and the most in need in terms of that. Also, any enhancement that we have brought in, like the questionnaire and a few other digital improvements, are there in tandem with the paper application or the paper questionnaire. From our perspective, when we see banking go online then it is online or pretty much nothing. We always think when a service goes digital that that will be the case and people will have to be able to interface with that digital service. I was going to say unfortunately but, quite frankly, positively we do not do that. We will always push digital and modernisation but we maintain paper-based systems and supports around any digital solutions.

As Ms Buckley mentioned, we have identified, and this goes back to a comment that one of the members made much earlier, the discomfort and concern some people have when they arrive in the State, especially if they came from an authoritarian society. We have identified the need for that sort of non-legalistic wraparound support when people apply to explain to them what the system is and that the system is here to help them, that it is here to help reach fair and balanced decisions and that the State can provide these services for them. We are very much in that head space in supporting people and using technology to help that; it is not a case of technology or nothing else. I hope that I have assuaged some fears.