Tom Fleming (Kerry South, Independent)
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85. To ask the Minister for Social Protection if she will provide, in tabular form, by county, the number of recipients of illness benefit granted and refused from 1 January 2014 to date in 2015; the average waiting time for decisions on appeals; the number of appeals referred for independent oral appeal; and the percentage of these approved and refused. [14488/15]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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The information requested is as follows:

Illness benefit claims from 1 January 2014 to 31 March 2015

For illness benefit statistical purposes - allowed/granted means claims awarded with a payment rate greater than zero. Claims that are disallowed/refused can come under a number of categories the most common being cases where a customer has no entitlement to payment on the basis of submitting a medical certificate for less than 7 days or insufficient PRSI contributions paid.The breakdown of illness benefit claims by county is as follows:

Illness Benefit claims Allowed (granted) between 01/01/2014 and 31/03/2015 by County

Illness Benefit claims disallowed (refused) between 01/01/2014 and 31/03/2015 by County

The average time taken to process illness benefit appealsdecided by summary decision in 2014 was 29.5 weeks and 34.8 weeks for those requiring an oral hearing. The average time for 2015 to the end of March was 24.4 weeks for summary decision and 32.0 weeks for oral hearing. The number of illness benefit appeals decided by oral hearing in 2014 was 242 of which 138 ( 57%) had a successful outcome for the appellant. In 2015 to the end of March the number decided by oral hearing was 47 of which 24 ( 51.1 %) had a successful outcome.

Tabular format as follows:

Processing times for illness benefitappeals 2014-2015 Breakdown by summary decision and oral hearing

Oral hearings 2014-2015