Mr. Niall Egan:

I accept that.

The Chair asked how many claims had been rejected and for what reason. We do not have that detail across the board. However, we noticed that this was a big issue, especially last year, for additional needs payments. We undertook several communication and awareness raising campaigns to promote additional needs payments and we saw an impact from those. Ms Goodwin and her team undertook detailed work with NGOs and different stakeholders to help people to complete the application forms for additional needs payments. For instance, we briefed the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS. We brought their staff in to talk to community welfare officers, CWOs, to relay what issues the people they were supporting were facing when they meet a CWO.

Therefore, we have a better understanding of the issues from the ground as well and as to how we can best address those. Based on that we have also sought to improve our communications about additional needs payments, ANPs, and reviews where those are not successful.