Govt faces extra costs to pay for €100 water grant

Extra resources will be needed to cover the full cost of the Government's controversial €100 Water Conservation Grant, RTÉ News has learned.

New documents show that the Government will have to pay for a range of additional costs, including consultancy, legal and procurement costs, on top of the €100 pay out.

The latest water revelation is contained in a letter from the Secretary General of Tánaiste Joan Burton's department.

It said she needed the extra resources, which includes the cost of extra staff, to oversee and manage the payment of the new grant.

The previously unreleased document was obtained by RTÉ News under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The letter was written in November by Niamh O'Donoghue, Secretary General at the Department of Social Protection, to her counterpart Robert Watt, at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.

She warned that in light of the Government's revised approach to water charges, her department will require additional resources for the Water Conservation Grant (WGC).

Ms O'Donoghue said delivery of the grant "imposes an additional burden on the department" and, "resourcing the processing/payment of WCG applications in 2015 and beyond needs to be addressed and cannot be accommodated from within the existing resource/admin budget allocation".

Sections of the correspondence between the two Government departments have been redacted, but a letter dated 24 November last conveys the concerns in the Department of Social Protection of administering the new grant.

A new system for processing and paying out the grant will have to be introduced within the Tánaiste's department "given the universal application of WCG entitlement to a far wider client-base than our existing scheme bases".

In the letter to Mr Watt, Ms O'Donoghue said it is "critical that we advance this project quickly" so that payments of the grant can begin.

The letter ends: "I would once again reiterate that I do not have scope within the existing allocation to meet this new and additional demand."

Postal costs for writing to every household and the cost of advertisements to inform people how to apply for the grant will also have to be borne by the Tánaiste's department.

The Department of Social Protection intends to start communicating with people in the middle of this year, inviting them to apply for the grant, with the first payments to be paid in September and each subsequent year up to and including 2018.

Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Seán O'Rourke programme, Minister of State at the Department of Social Protection Kevin Humphreys said he wanted to reassure the public that the grant would be paid on time.

"What I want to reassure people today is that that payment will be made in September and that the 1.3 million households will receive the water conservation grant in September as planned in the Budget," he said.

"I don't see any excessive costs in this. We're now going to negotiate with DPAR in relation to this and make sure it's done as cost effecitively as possible."

Mr Humphreys added that he had only been aware of the issue this morning and did not know if the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform had replied to the letter from Ms O'Donoghue.

Speaking on the same programme, Fianna Fáil's Spokesperson on the Environment Barry Cowen said the Government was throwing "good money after bad" and continuing to drain the public finances.

He said people keep being reminded of the Government's total ineptitude.

Department anticipates no issues processing grant

The Department of Social Protection said this morning that it anticipates no issues in processing the grant.

It said the department is still assessing the resource requirements in respect of new initiatives for the payments system and work is ongoing.

Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly told the Dáil yesterday that an allocation of €130 million has been provided for the grant in his department's estimates for 2015.

Independent TD Catherine Murphy has said it is not surprising that extra resources will be needed to cover the full cost of the grant to those who register with Irish Water.

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Ms Murphy said every household in the country had an entitlement to apply for the grant and it was clear this would require additional resources.

She said: "The government estimates that 1.3 million households will apply for it and that's a wider, as they would say themselves, a wider client base than any other of the social welfare payments.

"It was very obvious that there was going to be a need for additional resources within the department if you weren't going to impact negatively on claimants for social welfare payments."

Ms Murphy said the grant had nothing to do with water conservation and said the Government now needed to go back to the drawing board.

"This is an exercise in creative accounting," she said. "That's what I said in the Dáil yesterday in relation to this water conservation grant. It has nothing to do with water conservation.

"It has everything to do with satisfying the Eurostat test in relation to Irish Water."

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Govt faces extra costs to pay for €100 water grant

Dengan url

http://newsdeadlineup.blogspot.com/2015/01/govt-faces-extra-costs-to-pay-for-a100.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Govt faces extra costs to pay for €100 water grant

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Govt faces extra costs to pay for €100 water grant

sebagai sumbernya