There has been a good deal of debate in the House during recent days on the area of home help and the lack of, and curtailment of, home help hours and services throughout the country. There were questions during Leaders' Questions and there was a debate in the House last evening. Despite this, we are still no further on in terms of giving assurance to our constituents and the people we represent that hours will be available to those who need it, patients who need palliative care will have home help, patients who are in hospitals can go home with the assurance that home help hours will be available rather than being left in a hospital bed, or patients who want to stay at home will get the assistance available that is appropriate to their condition rather than what suits some clock-watcher or someone who does not understand the impact of the service.

One thing that has struck me is how the Government does not seem to get the importance of home help. It does not seem to understand the impact that the curtailment and cancellation of hours are having around the country. For every member of the Government, required reading this weekend is Marese McDonagh's piece in The Irish Times from last Monday about the impact in Sligo. It has the testimony of people whose hours are being curtailed and of people who have not got hours. It has the testimony of medical professionals who are seeing the impact of this curtailment and cancellation on their patients and on medical and hospital services.

From having listened to the Taoiseach's response to Deputy Doherty yesterday and having observed the debate last night, the Government does not get it. It does not understand what this is doing to families or patients. The Government is not joining the dots on the impact that the lack of home help services and other community care services is having on the health service generally, on beds and bed management or on waiting lists.

What I am asking for today is not the usual response. The Taoiseach has thrown out figure after figure and money after money. He is going to have a meeting next week. Why next week? This has been an evident problem for weeks. We are all getting emails in our constituency offices from people who were told they were entitled to home help hours but that the HSE does not have them to give. If all these extra resources are going in, why are there 6,000 people on a waiting list? Many thousands of others are not getting the time they need or the hours they require in their homes. They are left at home alone or in hospital beds waiting and families are being forced to pay for highly expensive private services.

I am asking the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment to outline specifically the actions, rather than plámás, the Government will undertake to address the issue of the 6,000 people who are on waiting lists. What can we tell our constituents this weekend? What can doctors tell their patients this weekend about the specific actions the Government will take to try to show that it understands the seriousness of this situation?

I thank the Deputy for the question and give him absolute assurance that the Government is acutely aware of the importance of home help services. Every month, more than 1,500 new people are provided with home help services. In the period to the end of April, a total of 6,000 new people were provided with home help services. That brought the number of people receiving home help support to almost 53,000.

As Deputy Calleary has said, demand is very strong and there are people waiting for this service. That is regrettable, but the situation, as we all realise, is that we have allocated 18.3 million home help hours. The HSE tries to allocate the hours across the year in an equitable way. It does not keep a reserve of hours. It allocates them to people in need. New people are continually presenting and, unfortunately, there is a waiting period for people to receive care. That is unfortunate but it is the reality of the situation. It is not for the lack of desire to expand the service because, as Deputies know, because they heard the Taoiseach say it yesterday, the budget for this service has been increased by 50% over the past four years. This is a rapidly expanding service which the Government recognises is important and is putting extra resources into.

On top of that, the Government is developing a statutory scheme and work is ongoing with that. Deputy Calleary rightly said that people believe they have an entitlement to this service but then they face a wait. The solution is obviously to develop a statutory scheme. The Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Jim Daly, has been doing significant work on developing the scheme and has held detailed consultation with people who are at the sharp end to develop it.

I can assure Deputy Calleary that the Government is determined to deal with this as effectively as possible, but Deputies will read elsewhere in the newspapers today of the pressure of managing spending within the spending limits that have been provided. Substantial new resources have been devoted this year to home help services but there is still an obligation to try to manage within that provision. That is a pressure throughout the health service in particular. There will be efforts next week to meet those who are at the core of deciding the allocation of resources to try to meet them in the most effective way possible.

I acknowledge the efforts of the Minister of State, Deputy Daly, and his commitment, but this is the reality of it. All of us in the Chamber have heard testimony from people whose hours are being cut. There is a perception that people have to die or leave the health service for new people to get home care and home help services.

We are indeed conscious of the pressures on the health budget, but at what stage will someone in the HSE or in the Government actually do a little work and a little maths?

The more community care services and expenditure on in-home community services are cut, the more pressure is put on the acute hospital budget and the more people will be on waiting lists. In this article, which every Minister should read, a surgeon from Sligo claims that people are deliberately not given home help hours because it is cheaper to keep them in long-stay hospital beds and it ensures those beds are not available to people who might need expensive surgery or other expensive procedures. I am sure there is no basis to that but when money is not spent on community care and community services, there will be health overruns and expanded waiting lists, and people will suffer. There is no understanding at Government level of the suffering of carers or families, and that is why the Minister needs to read this piece.

To reiterate, every element of the health service is providing a hugely important service from the Government's point of view. The Deputy seems to suggest that we can easily divert resources. Some 1.7 million procedures will be carried out this year, for example. People will be waiting for those procedures and we have to meet those needs. Similarly, other people need home help hours. Some 52,000 or 53,000 of them are receiving those and every month we add another 1,500 people to that.

The Government will not be doing that for the next five months.

This is not an area of neglect, and only a tiny number of discharges are delayed because of this. I have the figures from the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, and they show that fewer than 4% of delayed discharges are due to a lack of home help. It is not the case that this is the area.

There is that tone deafness again.

How much is that in numbers?

The Minister can speak without interruption.

We recognise that there is huge growing need in this area and we are making provision not only to expand the-----

They are freezing the hours.

-----provision every year but we are looking at a statutory scheme, which is being developed by the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly. When the Oireachtas gets a chance to consider that, it will provide us with a long-term approach.