Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman. I do not know whether the committee is familiar with Mr. William Parnell and Ms Gráinne O'Carroll from the Department who have done a significant amount of work in putting this together.

I need not tell the committee that the economy is undertaking a difficult transition from one that became far too dependent on construction, property and debt, and that we must rebuild one that is focused on innovation, exports and enterprise. That is a considerable journey. If one looks back, before we entered Government the average number of jobs lost per year in the private sector was nearly 90,000 and the economy was really devastated by the crisis. We have made jobs a priority so that not only are we about correcting the bank and fiscal problems, but we have put jobs at centre stage.

What we devised, in the Action Plan for Jobs, is a fairly unique instrument in my experience in politics, namely, a policy paper which is an annual process that embraces the whole of Government to work together on the central objective of creating employment. That has been really positive. To say a short word about the process, the plan is being monitored by a joint committee of both the Secretary General to the Government and the Secretary General of my Department, with other representatives of other Departments. They monitor the delivery, quarter by quarter, as to whether what was committed to is being delivered. Last year there was 92% delivery.

It has changed the collaborative way the public service works across the silos in a way that is really positive for our endeavours to deliver in the employment area. It has also speeded up what, certainly in my experience, would be inertia in the system in getting initiatives across the line. It has been a worthwhile tool. As I stated, we delivered 92% last year. Some of the measures were not possible, mainly for legislative reasons.

This year we are becoming more ambitious in what we are seeking to do. We have picked out areas where we believe there is a really strong strategic case to identify flagship projects that can make a difference. We have described them as "disruptive reforms". They are designed not only to address an area of strategic importance but to do it in a new way, namely, to bring in, as we have been doing already in the action plan for 2012, the various players in the public service but also for the first time to bring in industry partners to help us drive forward these particular areas. There are seven such areas identified across a range of sectors and they are listed.

The first of them - in no particular order - is big data. This is an area that is exploding in growth because of the explosion of information, both from social media and from the availability of various data sources. There is a sector growing around analytics of those data designing new business models to exploit the opportunities. Ireland is well placed for a number of reasons to position itself to be the centre of excellence in a European context.

Another area is ICT skills. I note Senator Clune brought a report to the joint committee previously. We have identified that as an area where we need to act, not only in the short term where we are committing to 2,000 additional graduates in 2013 but also in the long term to become the country that produces the most graduates in Europe in this area. The reason this is really important is that it is not only strategic to the ICT sector which is growing rapidly with 4,500 jobs in the past 18 months or so, but also one is seeing increasingly that ICT is transforming other sectors as well.

Securing a strong lead in the area will be central to growth in the ICT sector, where we have a competitive edge, and it will transform many sectors. Allied to that is our belief that we need to get more businesses to go online and we need to considerably up our game. Data suggests that companies who go online grow at double the rate of growth of companies who are not online. Obviously in a depressed domestic market any business that goes online will have an opportunity to broaden its capacity to sell. As members can see, we propose to target the measure and we will introduce vouchers that will assist people to make the transition. The sector operates on a competitive basis so we will try to generate a lot of interest in using the low cost tool because it offers a good opportunity for market entry.

Another area that we have identified is the long-term unemployed. I hope that stabilisation has led to a turnaround in our economy and that there is an opportunity to target the long-term unemployed who are the most difficult to place. Statistics suggest that the chance of a long-term unemployed person getting placed in the next 12 months is, in bookies terminology, about eight to one against or one-ninth of a chance. That is a very low chance when compared with a two thirds probability for someone under 12 months unemployed. Members can work out the difference between two-thirds and one-ninth.

There is a risk that many of the people who are long-term unemployed could remain on the live register for years. The JobsPlus initiative will offer a usable instrument to help employers give consideration to such people. Efforts have been made in this area because in the past we had PRSI relief and the Revenue Job Assist scheme. Such initiatives have never fulfilled expectations partly because they were difficult to comply with. One had to guarantee that a job would last 12 months. In some cases an employer had to stand out of money until a year after an employee was taken on. In other cases a business had to be profitable in order to benefit from a subsidy. I have stripped away the bureaucracy to make it a simple cash payment of roughly €75 per week paid on a month in arrears basis so that people can get that money into their hand fast. I hope that the new scheme can make a difference where the other schemes have failed. Obviously we must promote and drive the new scheme but it is worth making a simple change.

Licensing is another large area that we have worked on and one that we have significantly reformed this year. Senator Quinn is legendary in the retail sector. I can reassure him that we have examined 159 licences across all of the sectors and analysed how they were managed and administered. We identified the capacity to simplify them considerably and reduced the compliance costs by one-third. We will pilot the scheme this year which will identify and move 25 licences in the retail sector into a single portal. We reckon that simply by implementing this measure alone we will save the retail business €20 million. We will build on its success this year and will rationalise licensing. Many people felt that we needed to get a grip on licensing.

The final area of so-called disruptive reform is the energy efficiency sector. We have sought to leverage public money by getting private money to match public money in a fund and there will be a number of pilot projects in the public sector. There will be also an obligation on the public sector that when it spends over a certain threshold that it will commit to energy efficiency measures this year. We are also moving to a pay-as-you-save model. Our aim is to lift an area that represents a real opportunity, if we get it right, and then to commence systematically delivering it.

Apart from those areas which represent our fresh ambitions, we will continue to address many of the reforms that were the meat and drink of last year's project. We have made it easier to launch start-ups, rationalised the agencies which act as a first-stop-shop for entrepreneurs, rolled out instruments such as micro-finance and so on. This year we will try to get much more up close to what is happening in the financial markets. In the past number of months the State has put nearly €2.5 billion worth of funds, of one sort or another, out into the field to supplement bank sources of lending. We need to drive forward and sweat the assets that we have created and to try to change the environment for investing, particularly in small and medium sized enterprises.

I hope that I have given members an introduction to the action plan. This is a new approach. It is a planned approach. We had the Action Plan for Jobs 2012, we have a plan for 2013 and we will have one for 2014. The plan has been shown to work and we are making change happen. In the past year private sector employment has grown by 12,000 which is in sharp contrast to the 90,000 lost jobs per year during earlier years. Of course the figure is nowhere near where we need it to be and we need to go much further. We have a policy instrument and approach that is working and has some traction. We need to be more ambitious, as we seek to be, in 2013.