Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The Department is committed to delivering the best possible service to its customers. Processing times vary across schemes, depending on the differing qualification criteria. At the end of 2011, there were almost 52,000 people in receipt of carer's allowance from my Department at a total cost of almost €500 million. Approximately 22,000 of these were getting half-rate carer's allowance in addition to another social welfare payment.

The average time taken to award a carer's allowance application was 17 weeks in the third quarter to the end of September 2011, and not the six months quoted in this question. Due to the introduction of a new claims processing system for carer's allowance, figures for the last quarter of 2011 are unavailable as new claims are being processed on the new system while older claims are still being processed on the old system. For carer's benefit, the average time to award a claim in 2011 was ten weeks.

In order to meet the challenge of increased volumes of new claims for its schemes, the Department has embarked on a major programme of process redesign and modernisation, including the development and roll-out of new computer systems in the invalidity pension, carer's allowance and disability allowance areas. This roll-out of new systems is a very resource intensive task and consequently has had a negative impact on the claims processing performance for carer's allowance where the project is currently underway. Once the programme of roll-outs is fully completed, I expect that performance will recover and improve. In the meantime the Department is taking all steps available to augment resources in order to process claims.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House.

For example, since May 2008, 900 staff have been assigned to my Department, mainly through the transfer and redeployment of staff from other Departments. In addition, the Department has recruited new medical assessors and appointed additional staff to the Social Welfare Appeals Office. The Department also makes judicious use of overtime and employs temporary staff as appropriate to address particular service issues as they arise.

In order to offer a more streamlined, efficient and integrated service to customers, the Department is also undergoing a process of intensive planning and organisational change in establishing the new National Employment and Entitlements Service. The establishment of the NEES under the management of my Department brings together the community welfare service, the employment services and community employment programmes of FÁS, the rural social scheme and community services programme from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the redundancy and insolvency schemes from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.

It is my intention that the NEES will integrate all employment and benefit support services in a single delivery unit. This new service will provide a coherent integrated and more personalised service to customers and will help minimise the duplication that characterised services which were provided separately in the past.

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