Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

Members experience delays across a range of services. These delays cause grief for people and are a huge challenge in any system. In my previous Department, I tried to minimise delays in making decisions across the range of the operation of the Department and discovered, as the Deputy suggested, that the number of queries decreased the more we reduced the list or queue. This led to even more work being done. Queues take up a significant amount of staff time.

There are two elements to running any Department, policy and operation. Day-to-day operation is a matter for the staff of the Department, but the Minister has a responsibility to examine the schemes to see how things can be streamlined and to ensure we do not have inordinate queues at every facet. This applies to jobseeker's allowance and other schemes. I have no doubt but that there will be co-operation in making the changes. Some schemes require more time. For example, because there is no means test for jobseeker's benefit, it is much quicker to obtain it than jobseeker's allowance. We have to deal with the complexities of all of the different types of means tests for the different schemes. I will examine everything, de novo, across the Department to see if we can streamline the processes more to provide better delivery to customers.

I have dealt with the Department of Social and Family Affairs over many years and have always found its staff helpful and co-operative. When customers ring them, they genuinely try to help them and it has generally been a customer-centred Department. We must examine the procedures and see whether it is easy for the staff to deliver a good service or whether there are crinkles in the system we could eliminate.

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