Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

There are a number of different elements to reducing the overall waiting times for people making applications for benefits and schemes, as well as for allowances. The Deputy referred to duplication and the laborious processes taking time and causing delays. One of the overall changes that the Department is undergoing currently, as the Deputy is aware, is that community welfare officers are joining the Department and will become civil servants. They will be integrated into the Department. At the same time, the employment services side of FÁS will also come into the Department, and FÁS employees who join the Department will also become civil servants.

This will allow us to build a new national employment and entitlement service, which will move us towards the famous one-stop-shop. Instead of people having to repeat applications, they should be able to get a more integrated service at one point. As Deputies may be aware, people may also go to their local office and process a variety of claims at the local office point, which in turn will reduce the need people have had in the past to go to a community welfare officer when waiting for a claim to be processed.

The second element will be improving forms and the information technology applications. There is a great deal of work ongoing in the Department in this respect. A card system will be rolled out later this year with photo identification, an important improvement in the Department's procedures.

The Deputy also mentioned carers. There is currently an examination in the Department that is reviewing existing processes and procedures for carer's allowance. The Deputy and I have referred to claims based on medical evidence, and it is critical that when an application is made, all the information required should be made available to the Department to the highest possible level and standard. Faster and clearer decisions will reduce the number of appeals and allow the appeal process to be much faster.

The Deputy is correct in stating that a waiting time of one year is very long. I hope that with the reforms I speak about, it will not happen. The Department has faced an enormous increase in the numbers of claims across all fronts and it has been very taxing on the staff, which has tried to respond as quickly as possible to the significant extra demands being put on social welfare as a consequence of the economic collapse.

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