Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will respond to questions on community employment schemes. Community employment schemes are probably the backbone of every single town and village in this country and there is not a town or village that is not benefiting from the services provided under those schemes, which probably should be provided by the State or by Departments. That work is of major value. In response to questions from Deputies Joe Carey and Willie O'Dea, a review of the community employment schemes is currently being undertaken. Community employment schemes are currently recognised in the guidelines as being employment activation schemes. Under that criteria, people on the community employment schemes have a relatively low rate of finding work after their time on the scheme. Therefore I am of the mind that if there are schemes that are socially inclusive and are providing valuable services in our towns and villages, that perhaps we should call them socially inclusive schemes and change the guidelines from what one would expect under an employment activation model. At present, one is only allowed to spend six years on the community employment scheme, but if the purpose was employment activation, six years is questionable. If one has not secured a job from an employment activation course after a much shorter period than six years, then it is not as effective as it should be. What I favour is that in the course of the review we look at the socially inclusive schemes and call them socially inclusive schemes and change the guidelines to be more in line with the rural social scheme, RSS, and that we work more with people on schemes that are genuinely geared towards employment, that provide the training, the skills and the certification at the end of a certain period of time in order to ensure that those schemes have a higher success rate of getting people who have been through them part-time or full-time jobs. That review will be conducted in the coming weeks and months and afterwards I will come back and look for further guidance and advice.

I do not think there is a town or village that has not been enhanced by the services provided through community employment schemes. We really value the contributions that they have made. The last thing we want is to upset people by making changes that are not going to be welcomed. A number of people have told me that there are insufficient people to fill the places on a community employment scheme and there are empty places on it. We are not going to change other activation methods that are successful because community employment schemes do not have access to people. There are 250,000 plus people on the live register. While we have a number of vacancies on community employment schemes, we need to look more closely at those on the live register and match the skills they currently have with the vacancies on community employment schemes. I am open to doing that.

On the issue of the public services card, I disagree with the Senator who thinks we are rushing the uptake of the cards through before legislation will be enacted in the summer of 2018. The project started in 2011 and some 3 million public services cards have issued, but they were not issued in the past number of weeks. They have been issued in the past six to seven years. The main aim of the card is a by-product of an authentication process that was enshrined in law in 2011. When for example the Senator is invited to come for a public services card, we as a State must be 100% guaranteed that she is Alice-Mary Higgins and that she is getting the entitlements to which she is entitled and nobody else is claiming, either using her name or any of her identification data set. When she has gone through the process with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, given that we are the largest Department that has a social contract and make payments on a weekly and monthly basis, then she does not have to give all that information again and get authorised again when she wants to get a driving licence, a SUSI grant or a passport or all the other services that we are allowed share the data with as defined in the legislation. The rules of the card, which is the by-product of the authentication process is to try to make life simpler for people and not to be in some misguided way trying to catch the person out or give the information to people who are not entitled to it. Its purpose is to make our services more efficient so that if one has already satisfied the authentication process with one Department that one should not have to go through that whole process with other Departments. That is to put it in a nutshell.

I know people have concerns and we will address them, not least the concerns of the Data Protection Commissioner, whom we have met in the past number of weeks. That office has issued a number of questions to us and we will be replying to it before the end of this week. The Data Protection Commissioner will get a response to her 49 questions. Obviously we will then await her response to our replies. The aim of the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and my aim as Minister is to ensure that the data are protected; that we comply with all of the obligations under the law; that people are absolutely reassured that there is no ulterior motive with regard to this card other than it is a card that will help the individual to access public services with more ease so that one does not have to give all the information that we required under the Safe 2 authentication process, again when the person wants to access any of the other State services.

I am very clear that if there is a need for reassurance, or if things need to be clarified, we are absolutely willing, ready and able to do so. Let me repeat that the response will be sent to the Data Protection Commissioner this week and I look forward to her response. I hope we will come out with a ten out of ten score card.