Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 342: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs the increase in the number of staff employed in social welfare offices to deal with a backlog due to the increase in the live register; the number of persons who are part of this backlog in Cork city and county; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [25852/09]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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The Department is committed to providing a quality service to all its customers. This includes ensuring that applications are processed and that decisions on entitlement are made as expeditiously as possible. The Department has put a range of measures in place to deal with the extra workload arising from the increase in the Live Register. These include:

additional posts assigned

use of temporary staff to fill vacancies pending the appointment of permanent staff

extension of temporary staff contracts in certain offices

increased overtime

prioritisation of work

the setting up of Local Office Support Units

Since May 2008, some 300 extra staff have been assigned to local offices, new Central Support Units and the Departments Inspectorate. Of these 150 have been assigned since January 2009 as follows:

16 Social Welfare Inspectors were assigned in March 2009 to various locations around the country to undertake means testing and other work associated with processing claims for the jobseekers allowance.

49 posts have also been assigned to date for Local Office Central Support Units in 5 locations.

Some 90 temporary posts have been assigned to Local Offices around the country pending the assignment of permanent staff.

There is a significant training overhead associated with staff coming into local offices due to the complex nature of the jobseekers schemes. This is particularly so when a person is coming from another department and may not have any Social Welfare background whatsoever. While a certain amount of formal training is provided, the bulk of the training is "on-the-job". It takes many months for a deciding officer to get up to speed with all the various aspects of the schemes administered in local offices. In the meantime they rely on assistance from their more experienced colleagues to guide them in the learning process. Consequently, there is a certain amount of lost productivity while new staff acquire the necessary expertise of experienced Deciding Officers.

The Department is also implementing a number of process improvement initiatives aimed at improving overall processing times for the jobseeker schemes. Examples of process improvement initiatives introduced recently include:

A streamlined process for people who had a claim in the previous 2 years.

Application forms for the jobseeker schemes are now available on the Department's website. This means that anyone who wants to make a claim can print the form at home and bring it to the local office completed. This helps reduce queuing times.

More straight-forward procedures for providing evidence of identity and address have been introduced.

A more streamlined procedure for claimants moving to jobseekers allowance when their jobseekers benefit expires.

We have introduced an appointment system for taking claims in 16 offices and plan to extend this to other offices over the coming months.

The Deputy will be aware that anyone suffering hardship can apply for Supplementary Welfare Allowance. The supplementary welfare allowance scheme (SWA) is administered on behalf of the Department by the community welfare division of the Health Service Executive (HSE). SWA provides a safety net against poverty in that it gives a statutory entitlement to a minimum weekly income, based on criteria set out in legislation. The majority of SWA claims are processed within a matter of days.

The following table shows the number of claims awaiting a decision in each office in the Cork Region at week-ending 20th June 2009.