Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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342. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the purpose and the cost to date of development and roll-out of the public services card; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [17614/14]

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 Standard Authentication Framework Environment, or SAFE for short, also provided for the introduction of a Public Services Card (PSC) to enable individual’s 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.

The PSC is designed to replace other cards within the public sector such as the free travel pass and the social services card of the Department and to make it easy for providers of public services to verify the identity of customers.

There are 4 main sub-programmes to the PSC Project:

1.PSC design and delivery:The projects to design, develop and deliver the PSC along with the capability to issue, interact with, manage and provide customer support for the card,

2.SAFE Registration development: The projects to develop and deliver the SAFE registration business processes and the ICT systems within the Department to support them and generate PSC requests,

3.DSP Deployment: The projects to deploy the functionality in the Department’s offices, register clients and issue cards to them, and

4.Future use: Projects to oversee the future development and use of the PSC and its infrastructure, including possible use for on-line and financial services both internally and in other public service bodies.

The first two programmes of work are complete with respect to the standard PSC, a Free Travel variant of the PSC compatible with the Department of Transport’s Integrated Ticketing System and a variant suitable for issue to juveniles.

With regard to the third programme – DSP deployment: Following a pilot deployment, volume production of PSCs commenced in July 2012. Since then, the accelerated roll-out of SAFE Registration functionality across the country has continued.

The total capital costs of these programmes were estimated to be in the region of €24m, VAT exclusive, for a population of 3 million people with registration and card issuance taking about three to five years. There is no reason to believe that these estimates will be exceeded. A total of €9,854,985 was spent to 31/12/2013.

Following the pilot deployment mentioned above, sanction was received from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform for 150 additional temporary staff to support customer registration and card roll-out. The estimated cost associated with these staff in terms of salaries and training over the lifetime of the project is €10.9M.

To date, over 645,000 PSCs have been issued including some 142,000 Free Travel variants.