Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I accept that this is a juggling measure the Department has to do in respect of the limit. The point I am making and made at the start is that the Department does have the statistics. Ultimately, however, this is supposed to ensure we are satisfied that the money being spent is being spent in an appropriate manner. The committee does believe that that is the case but we do not believe that the statistics being used here and the targets clearly reflect the activity from the Department's point of view such that that then makes it easy for us to measure how that is happening and whether it is improving or disimproving. We would like to engage with the Department on what that basket of figures that goes into the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform report actually is. We are anxious to engage with the Department of Social Protection on that because I think it is more reflective of what is actually happening.

I will move on to some of the statistics in front of us. If we take the overall deprivation index and compare year to year, it is very hard to see a trend, and there can be blips and so forth. If, however, you look at the deprivation index over the last six years, it has gone from 8.4% to 12%. That is a 42% increase over those six years, when a substantial amount of public funding has been put in. As was said, that is not reflective of the massive jump in inflation we have seen over the past 12 to 18 months. I accept that it does not take into account the one-off social welfare payments we had last year either, but it is before the significant jump we have had in the cost of living in this country, yet deprivation for retired people has gone up by 42% over that period. I think it is something we as a committee need to be conscious of. Not all these issues can be solved within the Department of Social Protection.

I want to turn to supplementary welfare allowance on the additional needs payments because I was surprised, Mr. Egan, that you made the point earlier that the number of applications are comparable with 2018-19, considering that the cost of living, including the cost of heating, has gone up significantly and considering that the Department has actively sought applications through making a single phone line available towards advertising these issues and from the evidence we as Members of the Oireachtas are getting in respect of people in financial difficulty. I refer to the evidence the committee is receiving from the likes of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. It concerns me that that is the case. I am not disputing the figures, but it concerns me. That particular benchmark for us as a committee would be more reflective of what is actually happening and its real impact.

If we may turn to one figure in that regard, that is, the percentage of people unable to keep a home adequately warmed, between 2017 and 2022 that has changed.

The number of people who could not keep their home adequately warm increased by 64% between 2017 and 2022, yet we are being told that the numbers of applications in these years were comparable. That is a worry. These figures flag to me that something in the system is failing. The Secretary General addressed the committee on the community welfare officer, CWO, service, which clearly needs to be looked at again. I ask Mr. Egan to comment on those statistics.

My final question is for Mr. Corcoran. This committee also deals with community and rural development and deprivation indexes. We know from the evidence we are receiving that there is a bigger problem in rural areas because fuel costs have a disproportionate impact on people living in these areas. Is it possible to break down some of these statistics based on an urban versus rural categorisation?