Mr. John McKeon:

With regard to Deputy Mitchell's first question, we have not published the value of the contract. It was a competitive tender process and we have two providers with two different sets of prices. We want to try to keep it that way as we believe there is leverage, to the Department and the State's benefit, in not letting one provider know what the other provider bid to win the contract. It is a payment by results contract so we will not really know the full picture until we see the results. The value of the contract is entirely dependent on how well they do, so the only element we could publish is what prices they gave us. From a procurement perspective, we would prefer not to publish the prices because it is possible it would distort the market if and when we ever went again. The Department's Revised Estimates will have what we estimate as the total cost next year. We would prefer not to publish the prices. In the Revised Estimates we have multiplied the prices by what we think they are likely to do.

I will go through Senator Higgins's questions in reverse order. She asked about in-work poverty and decent pay for decent work. There are two aspects to the Department dealing with that. The main Department leading this is the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and it is responsible for the Workplace Relations Commission, the Low Pay Commission, national employment rights and so on. It is an issue that we raise with that Department. We are members of the senior officials group on economy, trade and jobs and our Minister attends the Cabinet committee. We certainly make our views known quite forcibly. Most of the time, they are taken on board, to be fair.

The Labour Market Council intends in the next year to consider this issue; that is sponsored by our Department and we provide the secretariat, so there will certainly be an outcome on that. There are two aspects to incentivising work, as we have always argued, and one tends to get much press attention, particularly from the tabloids. This relates to welfare rates, spongers and all of that. Our view is to ask what work will pay, meaning there is a second part to the equation. As the Senator stated, all our evidence is that the welfare rate is not an impediment to anybody going back to work. We certainly approach it from that angle.

The equality of outcomes is something we monitor and the Central Statistics Office does a good job of it as well. All the data are broken down by age and gender. Generally, the issue of concern from a gender perspective might be the level of female participation in the work force. The outcomes in terms of people we engage with are relatively gender-neutral. There is no evidence in the data of bias. It is really a wider labour market issue about female participation. That is tied into the issue of child care, the lone-parent family payment and arrangements around that. Sometimes it is difficult to say it but I will say it anyway, as when we examine micro-data in the quarterly national household survey, QNHS, to which our statisticians have access, we see that quite a few women who do not participate in the labour market answer "No" when asked the follow-up question as to whether they want to participate. I absolutely acknowledge child care issues and the way in which society is framed that makes it more difficult for women. I would never deny that. There is another issue about choices, and perhaps that is a cultural element. I do not know and I cannot explain it. Perhaps it takes generations for that to work its way out.

There was a question about constrained choice and I will deal with JobPath first. I emphasise that JobPath is simply meeting a case officer; it is just they happen to work for another company rather than directly for the Department. People do not have a choice in meeting a case officer. Mr. Lynch explained that if a person is asked to a meeting, he or she should go and engage with the process. If the person does not engage, warnings and so all will follow. I emphasise again that the level of penalties is tiny. We find that people engage and in general feedback, they are very positive about the engagement.

Where people have a particular issue, we will always look at it. For example, 200 people referred to JobPath have been taken back. It is done on a case-by-case basis of whether it makes sense for the individual and if a particular circumstance applies. The same is true with our own case officers or anything else. The same applies for Gateway, community employment and all of those as well. We look at them on a case-by-case basis. We have the general rule, which is to participate, but if there is a very good reason not to, we do not impose the rule in an unthinking or unfeeling manner.