Double pay for welfare recipients

LETTERS are to be sent to 144,000 welfare payment recipients today giving details of a once-off double week’s payment to be made to them later this month.

The payment, costing 25 million, is being made as a result of an improvement in the payment system operated by the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

It ends the anomaly where electronic payments were made one week in arrears while those with a payable order book are paid one week in advance.

Those who will qualify for the payment and will benefit from the improved payment method include old age contributory and non-contributory pensioners, retirement, invalidity and widows and widowers pensioners; those in receipt of the carers’ allowance and those on one parent family payment.

The double week’s payment will be paid to recipients next week. After that they will receive their normal weekly payment paid in advance. The revised arrangements will also apply to new recipients.

Social Welfare Minister Seamus Brennan said the new payments system was a further step in the modernisation of the delivery of welfare payments and the ironing out of irregularities that inevitably surfaced from time to time in a system that made more than 970,000 welfare payments a week, directly benefiting over 1.5m people.