Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Department is committed to ensuring that a customer service ethos is embedded in everything it does and is embraced by everyone in the Department. Significant effort was made to ensure that the highest customer service standards are achieved and these standards are set out in the customer charter and developed further in the Customer Action Plan 2013-2015. The Department employs a range of mechanisms to measure and evaluate performance against the standards set out in the customer action plan. These include regular meetings with customers, stakeholders and staff to get feedback and suggestions on how the Department can improve its service provision and delivery.

As Minister, I regularly meet all of the organisations involved in advocating or service provision in social protection areas. The Department also employs dedicated resources within all business areas in the Department dedicated to the management of all comments and complaints received; the use of internal management information systems to inform customer service policies; and monitoring and evaluation of complaints received through the Department’s comments and complaints system. Senior management in the organisation review the customer action plan at regular intervals and measure its performance against the service standards. Achievements in service standards are reported in the Department’s annual report.

As Minister, I regard it as really important that the people who used the Department services get a good quality service. We have put major investment into clearing the backlog that I, as Minister, inherited in respect of areas such as domiciliary care allowance, family income supplement, applications for carers and applications for a number of other areas. We have cleared all of those backlogs and we are now working strongly to clear the backlog on disability. This takes place in the context of demand for the Department's services having exploded from the period of 2008 to date.

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