Mr. John McKeon:

I thank the committee for inviting me here today. We have eight matters to discuss, as signalled in the letter. I am joined by a number of officials from the Department. I set out their details in the letter I sent to the committee. With the Cathaoirleach’s permission, I may rely on assistance from my colleagues in addressing some of the questions that members may raise.We also sent the committee advance information we hope has been useful.

Before turning to the matters tabled for discussion, I will give the committee a short statement of the Department's operations in 2023. In prior years I spoke about how the Department has responded to the successive crises of Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and the sharp increase in inflation. While these pressures, particularly Covid-19, have abated significantly during the year, the Department continued during 2023 to devote significant energy, time and resources in response to the Ukrainian crisis and inflationary pressures. For example, staff from the Department continued with their colleagues in the other Departments to provide integrated reception services to people fleeing the war in Ukraine. To date, we have issued about 103,000 PPSNs, 75% of which are to women and children. We estimate that about 80,000 of these people remain in the country. We also processed about 60,000 claims for income supports and developed and implemented a new scheme entitled the accommodation recognition payment, which is now being availed of by more than 8,000 families hosting about 17,000 Ukrainian refugees. We have also offered employment supports and services to Ukrainian adults, of whom about 35,000 attended nearly 70,000 one-to-one engagements with our case officers. A total of 8,500 Ukrainian refugees are also being supported by our employment service partners, with a further 8,000 referred to programmes such as community employment, back to education, and Tús. Revenue records indicate that about 17,000 Ukrainian refugees are now in employment. Total expenditure to date on welfare supports and services to Ukrainian refugees to the end of 2023 is provisionally estimated at about €650 million. The Department and its staff take pride in this level of response and believe that it acts as testimony to Ireland’s willingness, even in the face of the constraints on our own services, to step up and offer a helping hand to others in need.

As I stated last year, the war in Ukraine exacerbated an underlying trend in price increases that had their roots in the monetary expansion implemented in response to Covid-19 and in supply chain disruption coming out of the pandemic. From a social welfare perspective, the Government’s response entailed a combination of base rate increases and one-off measures, the combined impact of which has been shown by the ESRI to substantially cushion people on low incomes from the effects of inflation. In the period since 2022, the Department has made 18 separate one-off payments with a total value of about €2.4 billion involving just under five million individual payment transactions. While there are differing views on the appropriate balance between base rate increases and one-off payments, the approach taken to date has increased incomes of people reliant on welfare by more than an inflation-adjusted amount, with a significant proportion of the increase timed to coincide with the winter-spring period when cost pressures are highest.

In addition to the exceptional demands relating to Ukraine and inflation, the underlying core work programme of the Department has also been extremely busy. During the year the Department continued the development of the auto-enrolment pension system and implemented a significant package of reforms to the State pension system. The Department also consulted on and secured Government approval in respect of a new pay-related benefit for jobseekers and a staged increase in social insurance rates, with enabling legislation referred for pre-legislative scrutiny. Legislation has also been prepared and published to exempt child maintenance payments from means tests and, very recently, to change the welfare arrangements in respect of Ukrainian refugees.

With regard to income and employment supports for people with disabilities, the Department published a report to improve the take-up of the reasonable accommodation fund services. It has also published a Green Paper on reforms to long-term disability payments, which is currently out to consultation, and has started a procurement process to regularise and expand the delivery of employability services for people with disabilities.

The Department undertook and published a mid-term review of the roadmap for social inclusion and will shortly do likewise for the Pathways to Work programme. The level of demand for our core services has also increased. Applications in 2023 across all of our main schemes are up on average by more than 32% compared with pre-Covid levels. Notwithstanding this level of increase, we have maintained the level of service at pre-Covid levels. This is due in no small part to the dedication of our staff and their willingness to adapt to new ways of working, including remote working and online service delivery. The Department has processed in excess of 7.5 million transactions via our online platforms in 2023, up 25% year on year.

The Comptroller and Auditor General has spoken about the accounts. I will leave that part of my statement for the members to read.

Turning to control of expenditure, chapters 13, 15 and 16 all relate to overpayments. In other words, cases where beneficiaries received a payment to which they were not entitled or in excess of the amount to which they were entitled. As in previous years, chapter 13 sets out the results of the control surveys conducted by the Department to identify the risk factors leading to such payments. The chapter makes no recommendations but does note that, on the basis of the survey results, the level of overpayments is material.

The Department accepts this conclusion but, as before, we note that the overall level of overpayments across all schemes, estimated at 2.9% to 3.8%, is in line with, or slightly better than, the overall level of overpayments reported by equivalent organisations in other states. For example, the comparable figure for the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK is between 3.6% and 4%. This is not to say that we can be complacent. We always have to be mindful to strike a balance between, on the one hand, designing and managing large-scale service processes that are reliable and effective for the overwhelming majority of people and, on the other, implementing controls and checks to assure payment and service integrity. We are mindful in doing this that our primary purpose is to support people who need support and that we cannot pursue the elimination of error or fraud at the cost of unreasonably denying entitlement to service or frustrating access to that entitlement.

Chapter 15 deals with the issue-----