Noel Harrington (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the expenditure Vote. In the time remaining perhaps the Minister would consider some initiatives. In recent years the service provided by the Department of Social Protection has become a much different user experience than had traditionally been the case. However, there is still some work that could be done. An issue the Minister and the Department might consider would be a tracking system on applications for individual clients, similar to that which operates in the Passport Office. I do not think there is a public representative who does not spend a significant amount of time chasing down applications and using the time of clerical officers in the Department to check on where various applications are at a given time. An online tracking system would be helpful for all social protection clients. While many in employment are used to getting their P60s at the end of each year, one should get a statement of one's social protection information annually. If one could log on to the Department of Social Protection with one's PPS number to see where one stands at year end 2015, one could make a reasonable stab at where one expects to be on the date of retirement. At the moment, in our offices and in the social protection offices everyone is taking time out to get that information which would be useful.

As regards the question of getting more information on clients, there is a very big disconnect between the expiry of carer's benefit and the ability of the people who had been claiming it to qualify for full carer's allowance. They seem to fall through a big gap in the system.

My final point relates to the upcoming budget. There are huge demands on social protection and there is a shopping list every year for all the different sectors, such as the elderly, the disabled or the unemployed, but one sector suffers more than any other and that is the elderly who are living alone, where base costs are high and there is only one allowance in a household. The same base costs arise where there are two pensioners and consideration should be given to the disposable income available to two claimants in a household versus the disposable income available to those living alone. We should also recognise that every increase of €1 for a claimant living alone amounts to a charge of approximately €10 million, while an increase of €1 for those on State non-contributory and contributory pensions is some €30 million. We should look at the outputs and see where we are going with those.