Niall Collins (Limerick West, Fianna Fail)
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Question 343: To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation the length of time it now takes for a person to have his or her case heard by the Employment Appeals Tribunal from the date the person lodged his or her claim with the tribunal. [47089/10]

Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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The Employment Appeals Tribunal is one of the front-line services directly affected by the downturn in the economy. There has been an unprecedented level of increase in claims being submitted to the Tribunal - from 3,173 in 2007 to 9,458 in 2009. This trend has continued in 2010 with approximately 8,571 new claims lodged between January and the end of November. This level of increase has had an impact on case processing timeframes.

I am informed, from information provided by the Tribunal Secretariat, that the longest recorded waiting periods at the end of November for a hearing of the Tribunal ranged from 52 weeks to 77 weeks. In the case of hearings concerning redundancy claims, the range was between 23.5 weeks and 63.5 weeks.

Efficiencies introduced have increased the Tribunal's output, with 5,698 claims processed between January and the end of November this year, which compares with 2,807 claims processed for the whole of 2007. A business process review is being conducted of all administrative processes within the Tribunal to find further efficiencies, and the Tribunal is participating with other employment rights and industrial relations Bodies in to identify any further procedural and administrative measures that might be implemented to ensure better and more appropriate use of services. That review will be completed shortly. Once it is completed, arrangements will be put in train to put a new IT system in place for the Tribunal.

The Tribunal is taking further measures in order to address the upward pressure on case processing timeframes. These include increasing the number of hearings per day, and increasing the average number of cases being heard at each sitting.

I hope to make additional staff resources available to the Tribunal within the next few weeks with a view to enabling it, in particular, to increase the number of Hearings in Dublin, where the greatest backlog now exists, and also to establish a specialist Division for the hearing of redundancy related cases. In a recent pilot project in Cork, the temporary deployment of an extra Division there with a special focus on redundancy-related cases, allowed the waiting-time for such cases to be reduced from 44.5 weeks to 19.5 weeks.