Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

They are 20 permanent staff for the appeals office. You do not just drop somebody into an appeals office. They need training and experience and there is a process in place within the appeals office to do that. It would have taken time for those 20 to be trained up and get stuck in but they are definitely getting stuck in. I also point out that we introduced new social welfare appeals regulations from 28 April. One of the key changes under those regulations is that the time limit to lodge an appeal has increased from 21 to 60 days. A lot more appeals are coming in as a consequence of that. There is also provision for the chief appeals officer to accept late appeals of up to 180 days in certain circumstances.

The chief appeals officer continues to monitor the appeals on hand and the appeal processing times. I continue to monitor that work in terms of ensuring we get the appeals back as efficiently as possible. There is always a balance between processing appeals and dealing with them. I want to try to make sure we get to a good balance with that and there is no particular scheme that is an outlier. That is why, this year, I have focused predominantly on domiciliary care allowance appeals. We have it down to a situation that I referred to in reply to the previous question.

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