Incapacity Benefit (Hansard, 28 November 1995)

§ Mr. Moss

Responsibility for the subject in question has been delegated to the Social Security Agency under its chief executive, Mr. Alec Wylie. I have asked him to arrange for a reply to be given.

Letter from Alec Wylie to Mr. Seamus Mallon, dated 28 November 1995: I have been asked to reply to your recent parliamentary questions in which you asked for some statistical information on Incapacity Benefit. Some 30,000 claims to Incapacity Benefit were received from 13 April 1995 to 31 October 1995. Unfortunately, records are not maintained on the actual number of claims which were either allowed or refused but I can tell you that 2474 claims were disallowed during this period solely on incapacity grounds. Not included in this figure are claims disallowed for other reasons such as insufficient contributions, last claims and dependents claims. As we do not maintain statistics on the number of claims refused, I'm afraid I cannot provide you with the number of appeals received as a proportion of the overall number of refusals. However, a total of 358 appeals has been received by the Agency since April 1995, 50 appeals have been heard, 19 of which were allowed by the Appeal Tribunal. Of the remaining 308 appeals outstanding, 81 are awaiting hearing by an Appeal Tribunal and the remainder, the majority of which have been received within the last couple of months, are still in the process of being prepared. Finally, the average length of time taken to process an incapacity appeal from the date of receipt in the Agency until the appeal papers are despatched to the Independent Tribunal Service for hearing is 36 working days. However, no information is available on the average cost of each incapacity appeal. 673W I hope you find this information helpful but if you require any further clarification please let me know.