Up to 35,000 wait on back to school payments

TENS of thousands of families are still awaiting payment of the back to school clothing and footwear allowance, despite the allocation of extra staff to deal with the backlog.

The Department of Social Protection is almost certain to go over its €82 million budget for the scheme this year, with €72m having been paid out up to the start of September to 160,000 families — the same number of recipients as last year.

They include 127,000 people who received automatic payments by the end of June as they had qualified for help last year, under a new system of managing the scheme aimed at preventing backlogs that slowed its operation in previous years when it was operated for the department by the HSE.