Terence Flanagan (Dublin North East, Fine Gael)

We have a major unemployment crisis in this country, with 371,300 people now on the live register, according to the Taoiseach earlier today. This represents an incredible increase of 173, 300 in the short space of one year. More and more people seem to be laid off on a daily basis, with another 600 people to be laid off tomorrow from SR Technics at Dublin Airport. These people find themselves turning to the State for support. Unfortunately, the State is badly letting them down as the State institutions cannot cope with the demand on their services. People are waiting an average of six weeks to claim jobseeker's allowance, although it can take up to 16 weeks in some cases. The queues at some social welfare offices run down the street, leaving some people waiting hours to sign on. It can also take an average of six weeks for a person to see an adviser from the MABS organisation.

Our Front Bench spokesperson on social and family affairs, Deputy Enright, has quite rightly brought this motion to the House, because the Government has failed to address this crisis. Our comprehensive motion calls on the Government to redeploy staff to social welfare offices, for the role of MABS to be expanded into mortgage renegotiation and for the debt collection industry to be regulated. There clearly is a huge backlog of jobseeker applications in the system. The Minister has approved some additional staff, but this response is not adequate. It is completely unacceptable that people must wait up to 14 weeks to claim some unemployment benefit. The Minister needs to get real and redeploy sufficient staff immediately to tackle the huge backlog of applications.

We are still waiting on the new promised social welfare offices to come on stream in Dublin, Sligo and Carrick-on-Shannon. The Minister also needs to appoint hundreds of additional community welfare officers to deal with the huge demand on services. The HSE embargo clearly needs to be lifted for this to happen. Since the beginning of 2009, there has been a 35% increase in the demand for the services provided by MABS, yet the Minister for Social and Family Affairs has failed to adequately address the staffing levels at MABS branches. There is currently a six week waiting time in my own constituency of Dublin North East. I telephoned the local MABS office today to find out to my horror that there are only two staff working in that office, yet they have to deal with over 150,000 people. I am aware that this excessive waiting time is mirrored in other offices throughout the country. While I commend the service, particularly the help line service that puts people onto the correct offices, clearly a waiting time of six weeks is too long.

The resources of these offices are at breaking point. More important, the staff morale in the MABS offices and in the local social welfare offices are at an all-time low. The reality is that more and more people will be turning to MABS for assistance, given the current economic climate. We need surplus staff in the Civil Service to be redeployed into these offices to look after people's needs.

There are four simple measures in this motion that could be adopted easily by the Government. It needs to redeploy staff to social welfare offices and to MABS offices to deal with the current volume of welfare claims. The sub-prime industry needs to be clearly regulated. There are many cases coming before the courts which clearly do not need to do so, and which are putting people off turning up in court. The role of MABS needs to be expanded into mortgage renegotiation, and the debt collection industry needs to be regulated.

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