Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein)
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Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. Tá mé an-bhuíoch dó as ucht an am a thógáil, cé go bhfuil sé an-ghnóthach ag an aimsir seo. I am returning to an issue I raised previously with the Minister's predecessor regarding the social welfare offices that were closed in rural areas and in the Connemara area in particular. As the Minister, Deputy Leo Varadkar is aware, when Deputy Joan Burton was Minister, there was a movement of community welfare officers, CWOs, from the HSE to the Department of Social Protection in 2011 and 2012, with the Department taking over more than 900 clinics that the CWOs previously undertook. The Minister at the time maintained that the service had been enhanced, with phone lines being preferable to clinics and CWOs visiting people's homes to meet them where needed. It was said that the restructuring of the services was to be done in a way that would not compromise the accessibility of the CWO and the person who succeeded them, as the job specification and the name have changed.

We had a particular concern in Connemara with the closure of the service in Carraroe and the services in Oughterard and Spiddal being rationalised and moved to Galway city. The Minister at the time told us it was to provide for a streamlined and consistent service to the customer. The language used was interesting in that it proposed a "customer" rather than a client, and that anybody using the services of a CWO or social welfare office is regarded as a customer as opposed to a client.We were informed that where community welfare services had been restructured, alternative arrangements had been put in place to ensure "customers" - that word again - would be provided with ongoing access to the supports provided by the service and that, in general, this would mean that the frequency of available public clinics would be increased. At the time, I and others raised issues about this because in rural areas where a service was being removed or moved to an urban centre, transport connections such as bus services were not available. The latter remains the case. For example, there is no bus service to Clifden, the nearest centre for people living in Carna, County Galway. Anyone wishing to go to the city would have to get a bus first thing in the morning, stay in the city all day and return at night. This is still the case. From places such as Carna, the bus service runs only a couple of days a week.

People have told me they have been asked to attend at the centre in Galway on several occasions for three and four days in the same week in some cases in order to finalise their claims for supports from the Department of Social Protection. It has been said that in instances where people are not in a position to travel due to a lack of resources or transport, officials from the Department would call out to them to ensure that they were provided with a service. Somebody at a briefing on the family resource centres in the audio-visual room of these Houses last week said this does not happen when a request is made.

My question relates to the closure of these offices, particularly in the context of exceptional needs payments that would have been paid over the three previous years. How much of a saving has the regional office made in exceptional needs payments to the people of Connemara since those offices were shut down. What is the level of overall savings made by the Department through the closure of those offices? Tá mé an-bhuíoch don Aire faoi theacht isteach agus tá mé ag súil go mór leis an bhfreagra a bheidh aige dom.

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I thank Senator Ó Clochartaigh for raising this issue of the community welfare service, CWS, in Connemara and, in particular, the closure, in September 2013, of offices in An Spidéal, An Cheathrú Rua agus Cil Chiaráin.

The Government has provided €30.3 million for the exceptional needs and urgent needs payment schemes in 2016. In line with all supplementary allowance schemes, the overall reduction in the live register and general improvement in the economy has reduced recourse to exceptional needs payments, ENPs. In 2012, 459 ENPs totalling €149,000 were paid in the three offices and 177 payments totalling €73,000 were paid up to the end of September in 2013. Corresponding details on payments since September 2013 are not available as all such payments are now included in the figures for Galway city and Clifden and are not separately identified.

In 2012 a working group made up of staff from the CWS reviewed the ENP guidelines with a view to achieving standardisation and consistency in the treatment of applications across the country. This review was used as a basis for revised guidelines that issued to staff in 2012 and 2013. These guidelines provide maximum recommended amounts for specific items such as white goods, furniture and prams. The Department reviewed these guidelines in 2015 and no changes were provided to the recommended amounts. The guidelines assist Department staff administering the scheme and do not affect the discretion available to officers in issuing a payment to assist an individual or household in any particular hardship situation which may arise. The ENP scheme is demand led and continues to provide assistance to those with exceptional needs taking into account the requirements of the legislation and all the relevant circumstances of the case in order to ensure that the payments target those most in need of assistance.

Following the transfer of the service from the Health Service Executive, HSE, to the Department in 2011, the Department has re-engineered its business model to support the provision of integrated services across all business streams involved in the delivery of localised services. As part of this strategy, the Department is engaged in the delivery of integrated Intreo centres, which provide a full range of services, including the CWS, generally available in one location. The change is a move away from the traditional model of one CWS officer serving an individual location and delivering the full range of services towards a sustainable team-based approach. Where the service has been restructured, including in the Connemara area, alternative arrangements have been put in place to ensure that customers are provided with ongoing access to the supports provided by the service.

In the Galway area, this means that the frequency of available public clinics has increased, an improved phone service and dedicated e-mail address are available and alternative arrangements are in place for those who cannot travel - for example, due to illness - including arranging a visit to the client’s home as necessary. In addition, an appointments service is now in operation which is proving very successful in terms of efficient service delivery. The community welfare clinics in An Spidéal, An Cheathrú Rua agus Cil Chiaráin all operated from premises under the remit of the HSE. The amount of money paid to the HSE for the use of their premises is included in the overall memorandum of understanding between the Department and the HSE which covers the whole country. Any savings from the closure of particular clinics have not been calculated and could only be estimated on an apportionment basis. Staff who were working in these locations at the time of their closure were transferred to Galway, two remaining in the CWS and the third transferring to employment services as a case officer in the integrated Intreo service. As a result, there were no staff-cost savings.

I am very conscious of the need to provide efficient and effective customer-facing services at a local level for all customers of the Department and would like to reassure the Senator that the changes to the services in Connemara were not undertaken as a cost-saving measure but instead were intended to enhance the integration of all of the Department’s localised services in County Galway. I am not entirely sure what the Senator meant by making a distinction between customers and clients but I would be interested to understand it.

Denis O'Donovan (Fianna Fail)
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Ní dóigh liom go bhfuil tú ró-shásta.

Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein)
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Nach maith é go bhfuil a fhios agat. I suppose using the frame of a business model in respect of people engaged in employment services indicates the type of language that a client of a State agency now becomes a customer of the State agency. My concern is the use of that type of language. I am unhappy with the cutbacks that have happened in the ENP because even with the figures available from 2012 to 2013 it is quite clear they were cut back to a third of what they had been the previous year. I would guess that if the figures were available, we would see an even bigger cutback.

One of the issues was the closure of the offices in rural areas. People looking for an ENP cannot afford to go to an office in the city. These people feel compelled to travel into the city to go to the Intreo offices and in many cases feel intimidated in there. I know the Minister is a great proponent of the Irish language but many of these feel that the service is not being made available through Irish and they have to make a special effort to ask for that. It is very unfortunate that, according to the figures available, there has been such a huge reduction in the number of ENPs paid. Now that we are told the economy is improving, would the Minister reconsider reopening an office in the Connemara area to make it easier for those clients to access the Department's services for ENPs and other matters?

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I take the Senator's point about customers and clients. To me, a customer is somebody who goes into a business and probably pays money whereas this situation is the reverse. Health care always disliked the move away from the term "patient" to those of "client" or "customer". It is the term the Department uses and it is not trying to disparage those who rely on our services but to ingrain the idea of a business model in the operations of the Department. Perhaps it is not the right language.

I visited the Intreo centre in Galway city a couple of weeks ago. It is a very impressive building and a very modern centre. I met some of the community welfare officers, including the lady who goes out to the clinic in Kilronan on Inis Mór, in the Aran Islands, and chatted with them about this issue. They are very much of the view that they can provide the service in Galway city over the phone or by making house calls if needs be. For that reason, there are no proposals to open new offices anywhere in the country.

The overall cost of ENPs has gone down across the country for two reasons: first, fewer people have recourse to these payments because fewer are unemployed and incomes are rising again; and, second, payments were standardised across the country. On the latter point, in the past, because these payments came from the old health board system, people in different parts of the country were receiving different amounts in respect of the same fridges, microwaves or whatever they needed. There were significant savings when ENPs were standardised.