Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 July 2013

Public Accounts Committee

2011 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 38 – Social Protection
Chapter - 24 Supplementary Welfare Allowance

1:45 pm

Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

Part of that requirement involves bringing together an integrated service and rolling it out in an holistic way to customers. That is part of the Government's agenda anyway. It is not just a matter of troika interest. It also involves engaging much more quickly with customers who need activation support and help and putting in place the kinds of resources and mechanisms that enable us to engage with customers as quickly as we can. Reference has been made to the question of whether the best way to make sure courses are designed to meet the demand we are seeing from our customers is to focus on community employment or to develop links with SOLAS and the educational training boards. All of that is in the activation space. There is a great deal of interest in that. There have been many detailed discussions about what we are positioned to do, what we are capable of doing, what our plans are and whether we are achieving the targets we have set out to achieve. The third area of focus tends to relate to the question of structural changes in the social welfare system. There has been a particular focus on payments to people of working age. Equally, there has been a focus on the housing assistance payment, which we have just been talking about, in light of its role and the role of rent supplement.