This article is from page 70 of the 2009-10-13 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 70 JPG
SINGLE parents living in west Clare are waiting an average of four months for their one parent family payment after first lodging their claim.
According to Social Affairs Min- ister Mary Hanafin, single parents served by the Kilrush office have an average waiting period of 16.86 weeks for their first one parent fam- ily allowance.
Cllr Christy Curtin (Ind) has called for additional staff at the Kilrush of- fice to deal with the backlog.
“It 1s important that these claims are processed on time. The most vul- nerable society must be looked after and that they don’t have to bear the burden. The necessary staff should be in place to ensure all applications are dealt with expeditiously.”
The average waiting period in east Clare is 13.43 weeks, while the aver- age waiting period by single parents served by the Ennis office is 9.60 weeks.
In a Dail response, Minister Hanafin said “Additional staff have been redeployed to local offices from other parts of the civil service and the department has identified a number of locations where the increasing number of claims for means tested payments warrants the allocation of additional Social Welfare inspectors. Arising from this, an additional 40 Inspectors are being assigned.
‘In some areas processing times are
unacceptably high but every effort is being made to bring these times back to acceptable levels as quickly as possible.
“Anyone suffering hardship can apply for Supplementary Welfare Allowance. The majority of SWA claims are processed within a matter of days.
The average processing times for claims decided in September was 3.63 weeks for Jobseekers Benefit and 7.53 weeks for Jobseekers AI- lowance.
In Ennis, the average processing time for jobseekers’ benefit is 2.3 weeks and 4.78 for jobseekers allow- ance, while the average processing time for jobseekers’ benefit in Kil- rush is 2.99 and jobseekers allow- ance is 5.5 weeks.
The average wait in Tulla for job- seekers’ benefit is 2.88 weeks and jobseekers’ allowance is 4.29 weeks