Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)
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387. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the number of new identity cards issued by her Department to persons in receipt of social welfare payments; and if he will provide a breakdown of the regions in which the new cards have been rolled out. [9204/14]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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The Department of Social Protection has developed, in conjunction with a number of other Government Departments, a rules based standard for establishing and authenticating an individual’s identity for the purposes of access to public services. This programme of work, which is known as the Standard Authentication Framework Environment or SAFE for short, also provided for the introduction of a Public Services Card (PSC) to enable individuals to gain access to public services more efficiently and with a minimum of duplication of effort, while at the same time preserving their privacy to the maximum extent possible.

A PSC is currently issued following a registration process which involves the capture of an individual’s photograph and signature and the verification of identity data already held by the Department.

Face-to-Face registration is taking place in 59 local offices and, to date, approximately 555,000 PSC’s have been issued to individual applicants for a Personal Public Service (PPS) in Personal Public Service Number Registration Centres, and people applying for or in receipt of social protection payments or benefits, including Jobseeker payments, Free Travel entitlement, Child Benefits payments, State Pensions, and One Parent Family payments.

The majority of PSC’s that have been issued to date have been issued to individuals who were in the process of making a claim for, or were in receipt of, a social protection payment. However, the PSC is issued at a point in time, and such individuals may not now be in receipt of a social protection payment, or currently resident in the country.

Details of the numbers of PSCs currently held, by current county address, are in the table below.