Mr. R?n?n Hession:

I thank the Senator. I will cover a couple of points and then ask Dr. Waters to cover the consultation point and Dr. Singh to address medical assessment and the question around duplication.

In terms of how much is decided, the short answer is "Nothing". We have no Government decision to implement any policy. What we have here is a straw man or Green Paper, which gives one version of what a future system might look like. As the Chair noted, what we found was that this is a good way of giving people some focus. If we ask people what the system should look like, it is difficult for them and they will ask where they should begin as they have never designed a disability system. With this, we have a version that we think is worth looking at. It has pros and cons but at least now, by addition and subtraction, people can start to say that what they want is something completely different but they needed to see this in order to realise what they do not want. That is the intention.

We have a consultation period until the middle of December. We will extend that if that is what people want. Based on the feedback received, the Government will then have to consider where it goes next. Nothing is decided.

On the application process and half of the applications failing, one of the issues we touched on earlier is that in the current system people often submit applications that are incomplete. Once an application is submitted, that becomes the claim date, if the applicant is successful, to which payments are backdated. We need to think about how that process works, whether we are incentivising people to apply too early and before they are ready and to do that in a way that ensures they can get all their information together. What often happens is we get back to applicants saying we do not have enough information to make a decision.