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

I thank Mr. Egan. I am smiling at the last part of his statement. The committee has raised in the past the issue of the performance report not reflecting our needs, even though the purpose of its generation is for parliamentary use. This is a criticism of the Department of public expenditure and reform. We have had this engagement with Mr. Egan previously. I will not go over it again. We would like to see the output from his Department but this is part of a broader issue. We had the same discussion earlier with the officials from the Department of Rural and Community Development. The report is supposed to be generated for the use of the Parliament but the criteria are being dictated by the Department of public expenditure and reform, not by the relevant parliamentary committees. That is a weakness in the whole process. For example, the single biggest performance test for this committee relates to the payment of supplementary welfare allowance. That is not included in the report. Having that information would very quickly indicate to us, at a practical level, what is happening in practice and whether it reflects, on an ongoing basis, what we are hearing anecdotally.

Having said that, what we are hearing about the poverty trends is welcome. Historically, the figures presented in the performance report were a year behind. We were getting the expenditure and targets within the Department but the outcomes were a year behind in terms of what was being generated through the CSO. The use of the SILC data and the fact we can now compare similar years are positive developments. The presentation of the report is positive but the fundamental weaknesses are still there. As I said, this is a criticism of the Department of public expenditure and reform rather than the Department of Social Protection. I acknowledge Mr. Egan's comment at the end of his statement that he would welcome input from the committee on the metrics. The Department of Social Protection, in particular, is generating some metrics that are useful to the committee. The difficulty, however, is that a lot of what is in the report, which is taking effort and time to produce, is of little benefit to us, even though the primary purpose of generating this information is supposed to be to assist us. We find that frustrating.