Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Deputy to bear with me. We have had the greatest possible expansion in requests for payments of carer's allowance, family income supplement, domiciliary care allowance and particularly disability benefits. In 2009, the Deputy's party, when in government, reduced the illness benefit period to two years and there were good reasons for doing that. However, I ask him to think about this: there are 100,000 or more people on disability benefit at any one time. If, in effect, all of those are limited to two years, it means there is the potential of up to 50,000 people coming off illness benefit, in many of which cases it would be hoped people would have returned to work. Indeed, there has been a fundamental change in the numbers of people moving from a payment that was in place indefinitely to making a case to apply for another payment. That is one of the reasons for the huge increase in the volumes.

In regard to the carer's allowance and the domiciliary care allowance, the Deputy would have been very conscious when the delays involved were extremely difficult, but huge volumes of backlogs in those applications have now been dealt with and they are largely up to date. There is a separate issue, namely, whether everybody who applies will get the payment they are seeking. That depends on the quality of the case and, if it is a medical assessment, the quality of the medical information the applicant puts forward. We should bear in mind that there has been a loss of a quite number of medical assessor staff due to retirements. The Department has been addressing this issue. Three medical assessors were appointed in March of this year, a further medical assessor is scheduled to be appointed in June and another two medical assessors are scheduled to be appointed in September. The current panel will then be exhausted. The Department has approval from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to proceed with another medical assessor competition and we will ask the Public Appointments Service to run that competition. We are taking on significant numbers of very highly qualified staff. The chief medical officer is engaged in detailed discussions with the medical profession about how to assist the people who are in urgent need of the payment. There are also people applying who may not qualify for some of the payments they are seeking. Obviously in that case people may seek to enhance and expand the information they supply. Those types of cases take time but the time taken to process them has fallen dramatically.

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