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

I disagree with the Deputy's comment that they are without a penny. Nobody is forced to wait whatever length of time is involved, be it 17, 19 or 26 weeks, without a penny. That is what the supplementary welfare system is for. I encourage anybody who is waiting a lengthy period for an appeal decision to go to the local office where we will look after him or her financially. That is what we do. In addition to the continuous focus on improving appeal processing times, work is ongoing in the Department on a number of fronts in the context of improving the quality of first-instance decision-making, reducing the number of appeals being received and reducing the time taken in the Department to prepare the appeal submission. These include: better information gathering at the initial claim stage, which hopefully leads to better outcomes and better decisions; better explanation of the reasons for any decision to make it easier for customers to understand the decisions we make and to reduce the number of unnecessary appeals; a significant programme of training for decision makers on all aspects of their decision making functions.

Social welfare forms are consistently being monitored to ensure they capture sufficient information at the claims stage. In recent years, for example, improved claim forms were developed for the domiciliary care allowance application and that has resulted in the number of weeks people are waiting for the initial decision to reduce drastically. We did something similar recently in the case of the carer's allowance application with the Carers Association. Again, we expect it to yield a number of results for us. Everything we do is to try to improve the situation.

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