Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If there are any especially long delays in any area, I ask that the Deputy bring them to my attention and I will be happy address them and see whether there is a problem that we need to sort out. The Deputy was right when she said that people should not wait until the last minute to go to the community welfare officer. If they think there will be a problem, they should put in their application as to what it would be. The average is four weeks but an urgent need will be dealt with straight away.

I was at an event last week to celebrate 30 years of the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS. I was talking to some of the MABS people who said that there is a good relationship between MABS and the community welfare officers. When MABS said that it needs the help, it usually gets the payments straight away. There are other ways to approach this as well and if some people who have particular difficulties are concerned, they should go to the local MABS office.

Deputy Kerrane asked me about a review in 2021 and I wished to answer but I ran out of time. As is the case with any large customer service organisation, the Department is constantly reviewing and refining its operational procedures and management structures. As part of this ongoing process, the Department made some changes to how it organised the processing of the Intreo claims centre in 2021, to take account of remote working and blended working developments and to ensure that staff workloads could be balanced. It also made some changes to management reporting lines.

The review did not involve any changes to Intreo centre locations or services available to the public at Intreo centres. As is normal practice, these changes were discussed with staff unions and have been in place since January 2022. Ongoing regular reviews of internal structure and processes are normal in any operational environment. These routine operational reviews do not involve any change to customer benefits or entitlements but represent normal business process change and refinement. It is not the practice to publish internal reviews.

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