Fine Gael TD for Carlow-Kilkenny, John Paul Phelan, has received assurances that work is underway to clear the backlog of cases at the Social Welfare Appeals Office, which have increased by 130 over the last three years.
In a statement released this week, Deputy Phelan said that figures released to him by the Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, show that the annual intake of appeals has increased by 130 per cent over the last three years; from 14,070 in 2007 to 32,432 in 2010. And he added that it’s expected 30,000 appeals will be received in 2011.
“The overall average waiting time for processing appeals last year ranged from 27 weeks for a summary decision to 46 weeks for oral hearings. In an effort to reduce processing times, the Department has made three additional appointments to the office in recent weeks on top of the three additional appointments made last year, bringing the total number of deciding officers to 29.
The Minister said that she has been assured by the Chief Appeals Officer that the methods used to process appeals are under ongoing review, and are continuously being enhanced to achieve better outputs.
Deputy Phelan welcomed the efforts to clear the backlog and said that in a bid to clear the backlog, 3,000 cases registered before the end of last year have been ring-fenced and a 10-person team of the office’s most experienced appeals officers have been freed from all other work to concentrate on clearing this backlog. This project started at the beginning of this month.
“These efforts are very welcome, but there is still a long way to clear the backlogs that have been allowed to build up. People with very genuine cases are being forced to wait unacceptably long times for decisions on their appeals and this is causing great distress and financial hardship.
“We need to ensure that the waiting times are reduced significantly to an acceptable time that would be expected from an efficient and responsive system. Hopefully, the measures referred to by the Minister will address the problem and we will see tangible improvements in the near future.”
