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

The ESPCO Council is on 9 December. The agenda falls into some legislative and non-legislative items. I will deal with the items that fall into my remit. The Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, and the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, can be involved in different parts of the council. The agenda is still a little fluid, but the key non-legislative item will be the so-called European semester. This is the fourth European semester. Commissioner Andor will present on the annual growth survey, the joint employment report and the alert mechanism. These documents precede the setting of recommendations for member states. This is the start of the process.

The main legislative item that falls into my area relates to posted workers. It is a little too early to say whether the Lithuanian Presidency will seek to get a general approach or broad agreement from the Council on the issue.

I will brief the committee on the annual growth survey. This is the start of the European semester, a calendar of policy co-ordination whereby national policies are reviewed collectively and recommendations are made to member states. The Commission has published its growth survey and has set out that the main challenge is how to sustain the recovery that is now under way. It has put forward five main priorities for member states for the coming year. Broadly, they are the same priorities that the Commission listed last year. The first is pursuing differentiated growth-friendly fiscal consolidation. The second is restoring lending to the economy.

The third is promoting growth and competitiveness for today and tomorrow. The fourth is tackling unemployment and the social consequences of the crisis, and the fifth is modernising public administration. These are broadly accepted as an approach to deal with the challenges we face. There will be a focus on youth unemployment in a number of member states, including Ireland. The next stage is to go to the spring European Council meeting where the Heads of State will recommend the priorities on which member states should focus in preparation for their own national reform proposals. Those documents, the alert mechanism, the joint employment report and the growth survey, were published on 13 November.

The joint employment report provides an assessment of economic and social trends. This highlights the fact that there are signs that unemployment has stopped growing. It focuses on the need to boost growth in fast-growing sectors and publishes the scoreboard of key employment and social indicators across the member states. This was published in the Commission communication and is a new feature, which the Lithuanian Presidency seeks to have approved as an ongoing feature. The thinking behind this was to ensure that the broader social dimensions and imbalances would have a more prominent position in the assessment of policy, rather than their being dominated by concerns from ECOFIN, the finance council, which naturally focuses on fiscal issues.

The difference in this semester is that Ireland will be a full participant. In the past few years because we have been a programme country the recommendations from the European semester did not apply to us because we already had a set of commitments to deliver to the troika, for the quarterly reports. The debates and these reports will frame sort of recommendations likely to emerge in the country specific recommendations later in the year. The Commission is also expected to provide Ministers with an update on the state of play regarding the implementation of the youth guarantee. The Department of Social Protection leads the necessary planning for the guarantee here. There is also likely to be a presentation on a recommendation for a quality framework for traineeships to try to develop some standards in this field, which would enable trainees to require high quality work experience under safe conditions. Many member states are anxious to develop a better approach to this work. Germany and Austria are held out as the exemplars because they have a very strong and well-established trainee system underpinned by employers, unions and training organisations.

The posting of workers directive has had a long life and entails the attempt to find a balanced way to deal with two freedoms, that of businesses to provide services across the member states, and the freedom of workers to move and to enjoy the protection of workers' rights. The posting of workers directive is designed to create a better enforcement environment to ensure that workers posted abroad will receive their rights and that competition will be fair in that respect. The importance of this directive is recognised by Ireland in particular and by most member states. We have a comprehensive body of employment rights legislation, which applies to all workers, including posted workers and we really rely on the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, to enforce these. The proposal here is a balanced package of enforcement, which would ensure that there is more effective co-operation between national authorities in the area of enforcement, with cross-border enforcement fines and penalties, improved access to information for posted workers and service providers, greater transparency, greater certainty and to make it easier to control across member states. This tries to introduce a standard that could be easily enforced.

There is a series of other legislative items on which progress reports will be provided, one is a directive to facilitate free movement of workers. That is likely to make progress over the forthcoming period. Another is the equality directive and yet another involves gender balance among non-executive directors of companies listed on the stock exchanges. We are not clear how far these will progress. The likelihood is that there will be progress reports and nothing more. There will be a communication on free movement, which has already been published and is designed to clarify the rights of citizens and their entitlement to social assistance and social security in different member states. That is a Commission publication which has been reviewed and on which it will present a report.

The last item is a German initiative which the Commission has adopted, to strengthen cooperation between public employment services. The idea is that there would be more benchmarking across employment services in different member states and in time to develop standards and policy recommendations and best practice in this area. It is not clear yet whether the council will be invited to agree a general approach on this. It comes within the remit of the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton. I think that gives the committee a thumbnail sketch of what is involved and I am happy to take questions.