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

The Department is committed to providing a quality service to all the people who apply for the different schemes, ensuring that applications are processed as quickly as possible and that decisions on entitlements are made in the most efficient way.

In general, social welfare schemes such as these with a number of complex qualifying conditions can and do take longer to process.  Before a decision can be made - for example, on entitlement to domiciliary care allowance - evidence must be provided and examined in respect of the additional care needs of the child.  Similarly, before a decision can be made on entitlement to a carer’s allowance or carer's benefit evidence must be provided in respect of the care recipient’s care requirements, the level of care the carer provides, and caree's means in some allowances.

It is also the case that in order to register their claim and establish an early entitlement or claim date, many people submit a claim without giving all the necessary supporting documentation on the first day.  I am not saying this, but it has been acknowledged to me by some of the NGOs. While this ensures people will be paid with arrears from an early effective date - as early as they are entitled to it - it means that claims take longer to process if we have to go back to the customer and look for that missing information.

The Department is currently processing domiciliary care allowance claims within ten weeks and invalidity claims within seven weeks. Disability allowance claims are taking 14 weeks on average while carer's allowance applications are finally coming down and are now at 15 weeks. That is still three weeks more than our objective for every year.

I wish to reassure the Deputy that claims processing is kept under active review with all possible steps being taken to improve processing times. This includes significant additional resources, where available, and the review of business processes to ensure the efficient processing of applications. For example, additional staff have been temporarily reassigned to the carer's allowance area to work on claims processing. This has led to a reduction of three weeks in the processing times. We are still three weeks away from our target for every year so we still have a good way to go. We are committed to this and looking at it on a monthly basis.

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