Mr. John McKeon:

I fully agree with the Deputy. Every time I see the forms, I am shocked by their length. I have gone through them. On numerous occasions, we have looked to see whether we can simplify or streamline them. In the case of the carer's allowance and benefit application forms, we spent a lot of time with Family Carers Ireland and used a collaborative approach in respect of the design of the form. We work with the National Adult Literacy Agency on the design of our forms. We set up a customer communications unit, which has taken responsibility centrally for all form design because, previously, it was done in each scheme area. We hope that in the coming years, we will be able to refine them. It is about a balance - giving somebody the opportunity to provide all of the information that might be required to decide a claim knowing that in each individual case, perhaps only half the information is required but that if we do not ask the question of everybody, we might not get it. It is about achieving that balance. This might sound counter-intuitive but when we work with advocacy groups, NALA and so on, trying to make the language simpler means that we break questions up, which means that we then lengthen the forms. That is an inevitable consequence. I acknowledge that we may have gone too far on that. As we roll out our online applications, we are going through each claim form and trying to make the online version very simple so that people move from one screen to the next screen and it is not intimidating. One of the issues about forms is that they are not as intimidating as they look but their sheer scale makes them look intimidating. When somebody goes online, we will be able to take that intimidation factor away.