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

I understand that. Within the methodology, there is only so much that can be done in that regard, which I accept. I am more indicating if there were live sets of data that would be indicative of what is happening concerning the poverty data. The CSO, for argument's sake, might say that grocery price inflation is very indicative of the trends in poverty. I am only throwing that out there. While we may not have live poverty figures, the Department in its performance report would reflect it as it is reflecting it here and would say that grocery price inflation is as it is so the likelihood is that the poverty indicators will go in this direction. That would mean that when we look at these figures, we have something in real terms of what is happening. I know it is not a completely accurate picture but it gives us some indication of what is happening.

For example, one issue which the committee has spent a of time looking at is supplementary welfare payments.

Having the supplementary welfare payments plotted out in terms of fuel prices whether that is electricity, natural gas and so on, would give us some indication of how responsive the supplementary welfare payments are in terms of fuel supports to what is happening on the ground.

Members of the Oireachtas are very conscious of supplementary welfare payments because they are, ultimately, a bulwark against poverty on a day-to-day basis. One of the criticisms that has been reflected before the committee has been the centralisation of community welfare clinics into urban areas. In my own county, most of these clinics take place in either Boyle, Roscommon or Athlone. They are not taking place in Castlerea, Strokestown, Elphin, Monksland, Brideswell and places where they would have historically taken place. There is a concern that there is an urban-rural divide arising in terms of people making claims. Historically, there would always have been more claims in urban areas than in rural areas. It would be great to even to be able to plot over time whether there are applicants from urban or rural areas. It would also be nice to be able to do it by district electoral division, DED, or eircode region, at some stage in the future. I know that is not possible at the moment. It would be useful even to have that type of indicative methodology to see whether the lack of clinics in rural has had an impact on the number of people making claims.

Another thing, and it would be a very simple indicator, is the use of the phoneline. The Department has now rolled out a phoneline, which is the main conduit that is now being used by the Department for engagement with the community welfare service. In terms of like-for-like, month-for-month comparisons of the use of that and tying that in with statistical data of either grocery or fuel prices would be useful to see what is happening, and it would help Members to understand more what is happening, particularly with supplementary welfare because it is one issue that is consistently raised by Members. I would like the Department to have a look at what is and is not possible, especially in that area. It could possibly be a combination of Department and CSO data, but it should be more live and current data than is in the performance report.

A big difficulty for me and one of the big criticisms I have of the performance report is that we are setting targets for demand-led schemes, which means we are trying to predict next year how many people will sign on to the live register. That is not a performance target. If 50,000 people sign on the live register, we must make 50,000 payments, or it could be 40,000 or 60,000. The Department has no control over that aspect. They are a set of statistics but they do not provide us as Members of the Oireachtas with any insight into performance. Things that would make a difference to us as a committee are the number of people who move from welfare to the working family payment. There are two sets of applicants who qualify for the working family payment. They are people already in employment who apply for it and people who transition from welfare to work and avail of the working family payment. That, for us, would tie in with the Department's objective of trying to get people into work but also provide us, as a committee, with an indicator of how successful this is, and if it is not successful, why is it not and maybe explore with the Department how we could improve it.

Another issue that is raised consistently is the one-parent family payment, transitioning to the working family payment, part-time work and paying PRSI. These statistics already exist within the Department and are two key poverty indicators for us. We all know from the Department's statistics that the people on welfare who experience the greatest level of poverty are one-parent families. It would be helpful if we had indicators for how that is transitioning, if people are moving into work, if they are not moving into work then why not, and what can we do to help support them in that.

Looking at the statistics book the witnesses have provided, on page 56 and the number of recipients of the main working age employment supports, such as the likes of the back-to-education allowance, the back-to-work enterprise allowance scheme, the part-time job incentive scheme and the partial capacity benefits scheme, these are all schemes where we are getting people off the live register and back into work or off the disability register and back into work or part-time work. Again, these would be key indicators for the committee in knowing how successful are those diversion policies we are looking at. Is there anything we can do in terms of the policy area to try to improve those? In this case, raw numbers do not give us any indication because we are looking at a diminishing number of people who would be eligible to apply for these schemes, but percentage terms or trends in terms of that percentage, because I know the percentages would be quite small, or even having normalised figures, let us say, and where the trend is going in that regard would give us some indication of what is happening and how successful our policy is.

Another consistent issue for the committee is the carer's support grant. There is a feeling, rightly or wrongly, and I know from personal experience but it is only anecdotal evidence, that we are still seeing full-time carers still not drawing down the carer's support grant. As I have said recently to the Department at this committee, there needs to be a reinvigorated public awareness campaign in that regard. It would be interesting to see then how that is reflected in the data in terms of increases in the number of new applicants. Naturally, the carer's support grant will ebb and flow with the number of recipients of carer's allowance, carer's benefit and the domiciliary care allowance. What is the variation other than those in relation to it? A subset of these data that would be useful to this committee, because the overall headline data tell us nothing unless we do a deep dive into those data, is how many carer's support grants are being issued to people who are not in receipt of another supplementary payment. What is happening with that trend on foot of a reinvigorated advertising campaign by the Department?

On page 70, which concerns the school meals programme, which is a new and positive programme being run by the Department, and in fairness to the Minister and the Department, there has been a substantial increase in spending on the programme, we are provided with the spending on it, but that does not tell us as members anything, really. Is that because the costs have gone up? I know it has been extended. The Minister in her comments and in her press conference earlier this week did not focus on the figures but on the number of children and the number of schools. For us as members, it is the number of children in receipt of this, the number of schools in receipt of it, and the uptake within schools.

A particular connoisseur I have will not use the school meals available to her. It is not being run through the Department in that school, but she still brings her lunch in. It is one thing having the meals available but the uptake of those meals would tell us as a committee whether we are getting value for money with that. Some of us are old enough to remember the school milk scheme, which was a wanton waste of milk and money. The milk was not consumed in school. It was going into bins and down the sinks, but it was not being consumed. Are the school meals delivering what we all want in terms of the uptake of it? That might not be available in the Department's raw data and a separate survey may need to be done, but that type of data would be useful to us. A breakdown of hot meals and sandwiches being delivered would be useful to us as a committee as well, and those data are available to the Department.

I move to the statistics on the back to school clothing and footwear allowance, the working family payment as a whole and with respect to uptake and the back to work family dividend. These are all schemes that are meeting the Department's stated objectives, but how can we get a better insight into the trends of what is happening here? How successful are these policies in achieving the stated objective and giving us data that would be of benefit to us? On the back to school clothing and footwear allowance, how many of these are being paid out to families outside the existing schemes? That would give us an indication of what is happening more generally in society.

I have already spoken about the working family payment in the context of people coming from employment onto the payment. There are various reasons for that, including a change in employment circumstances and the birth of another child. I will not go into the debate around the fact the payment discriminates against families with larger numbers of children as that is one for another day and we will have it here in a few weeks’ time. What are the reasons this is happening? We are trying to get people off welfare and, we hope, moving from the working family payment into higher rates of employment. We are not just looking at this with our focus on the Department’s statistics of support but also at where people are leaving it and why are they leaving it. Are they going back onto welfare or are they going into better paid jobs? That type of information would be useful to the committee.

Another issue that would be of use to us as a committee would be the statistics regarding the claims rejected. I am aware we have it on page 100. Delving into the reasons for rejection is interesting. How many of these applications are rejected because the forms are not filled out correctly? What are the main weaknesses of those forms? From speaking to the Department, the anecdotal evidence is quite a number of forms get returned because they are not signed. Even knowing the reasons they are returned might allow the Department to run an awareness campaign or make it crystal clear at the top of every application form that the first thing a person should do is sign it. The Department talks about the statistics in the form of processing times. Those times are dependent on completed applications coming in, so rather than giving us the processing times, indications of why they are rejected and how many would give us as a committee a better idea of what is happening with them. To try to address this, the Department could produce a frequently asked questions sheet outlining the main mistakes made in particular applications so people may be aware of those. That would also make Oireachtas Members aware, so when we are advising people on, say, their carer’s allowance application, they ensure they have the medical report completed and submitted. That would be of benefit.

Another issue that has come up here relates to carers who are no longer in a caring role. Their return to work or to training is something the committee is very interested in. Unfortunately, quite a lot of carers who are out of paid work and involved in a caring role for a considerable period of time end up back on the live register. Knowing how long they are on the register and what interventions are being made to get them back into training or employment and what type of employment they are getting into would be indicative of whether our policies on supporting family carers are working. It is an issue the committee has an interest in.

Turning to the quarterly statistics, the uptake of maternity benefit and especially paternity and parents’ benefit are indicative of whether the policies are being delivered in this particular area. I spoke about additional needs earlier. I accept no performance report can include all these, but as a committee we are trying to look at indicative sets of data that could be included in the performance report that would give us an indication of what is happening in this area, and I am throwing out suggestions on that.

There is another issue the committee will be looking at in the week after next in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report, and this comes back to Deputy Ó Cuív’s question earlier, namely, overpayments. This is something the committee has made recommendations to the Department on before. None of us want to see overpayments. They are not good from an accountability point of view and are not good for the recipient either, especially those on welfare payments who find it hard to manage money anyway. Having to make a 15% repayment weekly, particularly in the current economic climate, puts a huge financial burden on them. The vast majority of overpayments are inadvertent. Very few of them are actually fraud. For us as a committee, having more targeted reviews that would try to address these in the short term rather than letting arrears accrue would be useful. Over half the overpayments happened, I think, six years prior, so there is an accumulation there. A lot of it comes back to the means situation Deputy Ó Cuív spoke about where there has been an incremental increase in savings and, as a result, overpayments build up over a period of time. I suspect if some analysis were done of the targeted reviews that have been carried out in the past 12 months, many of them would fall into this category.

It would make far more sense for the Department to run a set of awareness-raising campaigns pointing out that if your social welfare payment has not been reviewed in a number of years and if you have savings in the bank of more than €20,000 as a single person or €40,000 as a married person, you should make the Department aware of that fact, rather than letting arrears accrue in this respect. The difficulty with older people, in particular, is that such people with joint bank accounts, where one is a contributory payment and the other is a non-contributory payment, do not realise that where they hold a joint bank account, this has implications as to the non-contributory payment. Is there a way we can drive down those numbers of incidents? They have to be measured, in the first instance, which is where the Department comes in, but the objective over time is to reduce those numbers. One of the best ways of doing that is through awareness-raising.

My point is that by carrying out measurements from a statistical point of view, the Department can then try to set targets to reduce those numbers and problem-solve as to what is the best way to do that. Is it through an information campaign or through some other mechanism of engaging with active retirement groups around the country? I am told that at long last, a very valuable service which was historically within the Department is being brought back, which is the information officers. With that type of engagement, if such officers had that type of information available to them and if they were actively going out to engage with communities on it, it would help to drive down those figures.

I have given the Department a long list of suggestions here and I do not expect it to come back on them today but I am asking the Department to look at some of these suggestions. These are the issues which we, as members of this committee and as Members of the Oireachtas, are coming up with on a day-to-day basis. We all have the one objective on this. As I said at our previous meeting, other than my initial comments, I am not asking for the Department to reinvent the wheel here. Many of the statistics I am talking about are available but it is a matter of some of those being included in the performance targets. While this is set out by the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, it may be the case that one or two of these suggestions are reflected in the performance target but that when the Department comes before this committee, it would have a supplementary note on some of the other proposals. We do not have to stick rigidly to this performance target. It may be the case that other supplementary elements could be presented to this committee and to its successor that would help to provide an insight into some of those performance targets, which would be more effective to us.

As Deputy Ó Cuív said earlier and as I have already said, some of the figures here tell us absolutely nothing. The average number of weekly payments having a target and delivery in relation to it does not give us any insight into what is going on in the Department. These are demand-led schemes. To say that 100% of them are paid on time each week is what I would expect, namely, that every payment is paid on time each week. Those figures do not provide us with any insight as to what is going on within the Department. The Department has the data and statistics there that will be more reflective of what is happening within the Department but also will give us a greater insight into where we need to change policy, which is the objective behind this performance report. It is one that is supposed to assist us as members in holding the Department to account with respect to its spend.

I have to say, honestly, from my engagement with the Department - it will be robust and always will be - that there is always a willingness to try to address the issue and it is always coming from that perspective. We might never succeed in that regard but the perception I get in dealing with the Department is that it is trying to do the best it can for the people it is trying to serve. It is not a case of this is the way things have always been done and will continue to be done. It is a Department that is always willing to learn and grow and an alteration in either some of the way the performance report itself is presented, or supplementary data which could reflect better what is in the performance report, would ensure that we as a committee would have a more robust engagement in the future.

I will leave those comments with the Department and I ask Mr. Egan or his colleagues to by all means come back on any particular aspect of them, if they so wish. It is more a question of us as a committee throwing out suggestions to the Department as to where we would like to see these reflected in some manner in the data that are presented before the committee next year. I thank our guests and the committee.