Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 5 July 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection
Public Service Performance Report 2022: Department of Social Protection
Mr. Alan Flynn:
I completely appreciate all those points. To make one point clear, we collate these returns and provide them to colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform annually and, as you can imagine, in a Department as large and diverse as ours, we pull lots of statistics together. You can see in this that there are three or four pages for the Department of Social Protection, and my colleague Mr. Corcoran publishes hundreds of pages of statistics in our annual report. It is a matter of trying to find a sweet spot between the two. We have been given in the format we provide back to our colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform a hard limit of ten lines in each programme area covering the sum of both the outputs and the impacts. You can see in each of these that we have seven or eight already. We are very happy to add lines as long as we fit within the ten-line limit. I think that is to keep the report consistent through all the Departments. The Department also publishes its annual statistical report and, as we alluded to in the briefing, the quarterly statistical report. Perhaps some of those places are where the real deep-dive statistics are. We cannot fit them in. We are happy to fill in up to the limit we can get to, but I am sure the Deputies will have many suggestions as to what would be a good figure to have in here. We will run out of room fairly quickly but we are very happy to engage with the committee on that.
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