Dr. John Sweeney:

For those of working age who receive a payment for a status which has them outside the workforce, does that imply sanctions coming to them? I am also concerned about the term “activation” as it always has that connotation that it is the individuals in receipt of welfare payments who need the activation. In fact, the activation has to be of services, the Government and policy. After much work with the National Economic and Social Council, I have not found evidence that our social welfare payments are laxly administered.

I have not found evidence that the incidence of fraudulent receipt of welfare in Ireland is particularly bad. Each instance of fraudulent receipt of welfare is one instance too much but, by and large, the control mechanisms of the Department of Social Protection pass a good test by international standards. It is regrettable that sanctions come into the question of how we encourage more people, who are currently in long-term receipt of a welfare payment, to enter sustained employment. We should pay credit to those in the control and fraud section of the Department and advise them to continue their work but we do not have to use active labour market programmes as an extension of their work. Those programmes should have an objective and an identity apart from that.

Senator Humphreys is right in that every time we get the live register figures for the month, we are reminded that the live register is not a measure of unemployment. For that, we have the quarterly national household survey, QNHS. The labour force survey, the QNHS, tells us about the extent of demand there is among the population for employment and those who are frustrated at not being able to get the job they are seeking. The focus of attention must be, as Senator Higgins has also implied, on those who are frustrated at not being able to find paid employment, rather than on the live register. The live register is the claimant count. Many people who are on systematic part-time work are recorded on it. Their status is totally valid and there is not an issue with them. If the Labour Market Council is truly to become an advisory body on labour market policy rather than on the management of the live register, it needs to align much more with economic development policy, Enterprise 2025 and the national skills strategy 2025.

This tension is lived daily within the Department of Social Protection and within the Intreo service. As members are aware, the capacity of Intreo has been enormously expanded by bringing in case officers who have very different backgrounds. Some have come from the old National Manpower Service and there are placement officers from FÁS and they understand perfectly well the position from where each Senator is coming on this. We would ask what is all the attention about the live register and ask if we are overdoing the focus. The former public employment service was there for anyone who wanted work but was not able to get it. We have merged those people and that culture with those who were primarily administering payments and who had to work very closely with those in the control and fraud section to ensure that only those who were entitled to it were getting a payment. In fairness to the Intreo service as we now have it, that tension continues and the merging of those two cultures is a work in progress.

On the question of what people are training for, I fully agree with Senator Humphreys that there is justifiable scepticism among many who have been looking for work for a long time with some of the opportunities for education and training that they have been offered. They are hungry to get back to work. The provision of good career guidance is essential for them. It is not enough to say that they do not want work, they want this. People need to be made aware of what, if they go into a certain job, will lie down the line for them. Good career guidance must be informed with good labour market intelligence. The people being given such career guidance must be given good insight into what is happening and what will most surely happen in a particular line of work that they are currently hungry to get into. One must ask them if this in their long-term interests? We cannot simply read the demand for education and training from the preferred list of jobs that comes from those currently on the live register. Good career guidance is an interactive two-way process.

Most of those at work need upskilling. Apprenticeships will be a small part of the contribution. Traineeships offer potentially a greater quantitative contribution to what is a dual education approach, allowing people at work to upskill and allowing people preparing for work to be exposed to the workplace while they are receiving their training. Sadly, in underlining the importance of further training opportunities to those already at work, the evidence is that employers invest and co-operate more with outside bodies in training those who have higher education among their workforce. The uptake of continuing education and vocational training opportunities by people at work tends to be of the better educated in the workforce. It brings me back to the evidence that if one enters a low-skilled job because one is low skilled, it is unlikely that that employer will be particularly interested in facilitating or supporting one to upskill.