Mr. Niall Egan:

I acknowledge and agree with the Chair that from the Department's perspective, we genuinely are always trying to improve. We pride ourselves on that and on genuinely trying to help the people we are supporting. We have a lot of modernisation, including digitalisation projects under way to make our services accessible 24 hours per day, seven days per week. We are also keen to maintain the existing channels. We know that face-to-face, telephone and postal communications will continue to be valuable challenges. I acknowledge the Chair's comments on that and thank him for them.

I also thank the committee for the numerous suggestions. We will take them away, consider them and reframe how we can best put forward what the committee is looking for in next year's public service performance report, PSPR. Some of the output targets, such as processing times are important to retain as was evident from last year's report showing where we fell below the target we set in some areas. The committee asked us why that had happened and we responded with supplementary material about domiciliary care allowance. We essentially moved an entire unit to a new area of the Department. It was an absolutely justifiable question to ask. There is strong merit in keeping those kinds of targets. However, what was said on the broad remit is duly noted.

The Chair commented on more up-to-date statistics. We have a model available called SWITCH, which we run in-house and the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, also runs. We are able to use it to produce more timely information such as what the Deputy is looking for on the poverty impact of certain measures.