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

I will give the Deputy some new statistics since the last time he asked a question about this matter. There are currently 81,652 people in receipt of carer's allowance providing care to 89,679 recipients with 49,704 qualified children. There are some 2,770 people in receipt of carer's benefit giving care to 3,185 people. The average processing time for carer's benefit is 11 weeks. The average processing time for carer's allowance was 17.3 weeks and as of the end of April this year it is down to 12 weeks. I will give the Deputy all these statistics instead of just standing here and reading them out to him. I know how frustrating this is but it is equally frustrating to us. We will potentially have staff freed up from illness benefit, for example, arising from the extra staff we allocated to that section. When we have staff freed up from certain schemes, we put them in the areas that are most in need. I hope people can see that the numbers are coming down. The waiting times for domiciliary care allowance, DCA, applications have reduced drastically. The waiting times for carer's allowance and carer's benefit are reducing. Even 12 weeks is probably sometimes a little long, but we set the targets for a reason: we want to achieve them. I hope the Deputy can see that the numbers are coming down.

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