Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The legislation is being drafted. I hope to bring it forward as part of one of the Bills currently before the House or perhaps the social welfare Bill later in the year. The proposed timeframe for contacting people has not slipped. Everyone who has become a pensioner since 2012 will be contacted, with a view to assessing them under the changes that have been made. During that process they will be assigned a home caring credit if they were carers before 1994, an illness or a job seeking credit. In many cases, they will already have a jobseeker's credit and an illness credit because it would have been ascertained during the original assessment made for receipt of their pension payment. However, they will be completely reassessed. Payments under the new and old systems will be offered. Pensioners will make the decision on which system under which they want to be adjudicated on. Whoever opts to be assessed under the new system will have his or her payment made, backdated to 26 March when all of the other changes made in the budget came into play. For example, those who are expecting to receive their lump sum at some point in quarter one of 2019 will find that it was backdated to 26 March 2018. That process has not changed and is not slipping. As I said, we are drafting the legislation. I will bring it forward as part of some other Bill with the co-operation of the House because we have a good number of pieces of legislation which are due to pass through the Houses between now and the end of the summer. The assessment will start later this year and it will then be up to people to determine whether they want to move to the new system or stay within the old one once the payments start in quarter one of next year.

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