Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Perhaps I am misunderstanding this, and I welcome the Minister's announcement that he intends to relax the rules relating to community employment, but my experience of JobPath has been that if people have been unemployed and in receipt of jobseeker's allowance for a certain period of time, that is sufficient to qualify for the JobPath scheme. However, they have come to me and said they are not offered employment. In some cases they are offered jobs that are so far away from where they live, they would be at a net loss if they took them. Generally, however, many of them have not been offered employment and when a CE scheme comes up in an area for which they would be very suitable, they find that the cannot qualify for it because they are on JobPath. Obviously, they would be better off on the CE scheme than on jobseeker's allowance and they would be doing something useful. They would be working. That is the problem quite a few people are presenting to me.

I take the Minister's point that the JobPath companies do not impose penalties but the people I am dealing with, and perhaps I am unique in this, are terrorised by JobPath. They have had some very bad experiences with JobPath. I do not know if other people have had this experience but when people complain to me, they tell me not to use their name because the JobPath people will give a very bad report on them to the Department of Social Protection and they will be penalised.

The Minister stated during the last Question Time in the Dáil that a customer satisfaction survey was being done among customers of JobPath. How is that progressing?