Dr. Mary Murphy:

Mr. Lysaght introduced the issue of attitude, and I am picking up that point because I think that frames some of the answers to questions. If there is an underlying theme, it is that in part the attitude of the State to the issue of activation policy is very dominated by an old fashioned agenda, that it is the job of the State to control the public purse to ensure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing for the relative payments they are on. That is what dominates their attitude when they start their engagement with an individual. The officer of the State sees the individual as a social welfare recipient who is costing the State money and the job is to manage that payment. There is a control agenda. An alternate view is to consider the individual as a citizen with particular barriers to work and with particular experiences that are causing their psychological well-being to be undermined. If we could change the attitude of the State to one that was ambitious for its citizens rather than wanting to control the cost of its problems, I think we would be at a very different starting point in our discussions.

In large part, the reason that activation is not working for people, particularly for more vulnerable people, such as those with disabilities, lone parents, long-term unemployed is that the State is too keen to push people far too speedily through a process to get very specific outcomes from it that are predetermined by procurement outcomes and such things, rather than realistically looking at what is the situation that this person is coming from and how can we work with this person to get a long-term outcome that will be sustainable for their well-being.

I think we are not asking the right questions and that is why we are not getting the right answers. Let us look at what procurement is doing because the contractors are being paid by results. We are looking for results far too quickly. The feedback from SICAP and LES is that under their contracts they are being asked to do quite impossible things for the people with whom they are working. They see that they are forcing people far too quickly through processes. They are being forced to offer them the wrong opportunities. There is a significant level of frustration on the ground among the workers as well as the clients that they are not able to really do what the person needs. They can see what the person needs and the services are potentially there to do it, but they are not able to package them in the way that makes sense for people. I think the underlying attitude informing the design of the services need to be examined again. There are false pressures, I mentioned the false pressure of procurement dominating how we arrange the design of the actual services themselves. We can see that on the ground. We can see organisations competing and not co-operating with each other. We can see people being referred to the wrong services. We can see people being told we cannot do anything with them for a year because some other provider has got them right now but if they can wait it out for the year, the person will be eligible for a community employment scheme again and that will be okay. There are crazy things happening to people.

I do not know if members watched "I, Daniel Blake", which shows what happens to a person's life when bureaucracy goes mad. We have the Irish style experience - I call them "Dónal" Blake's stories - where people are being caught in bureaucratic quagmires because of the design of the system. We recently conducted a very large research programme on the integrated delivery of social services. What we can see is that there are a lot of integration issues not happening both vertically and horizontally on the ground. What we are assuming is connected up is not connected up and some of it is that the target organisations that clients work with, are too speedy for what people need. We are pushing them to get through education outcomes far too quickly.

If we take lone parents as an example in terms of our ambition for people and look at the education and training options also, the data indicates that almost 50% of lone parents have very poor educational outcomes. Our ambition is to get them into something like a FETAC 5 course, which will get them a care job at the minimum wage and then we wonder why that is not moving people out of poverty and why activation is not working for lone parents. We know that if we want a lone parent to get a job that is sustainable in terms of lifting her and her family out of poverty, we need to invest in education at a much higher level than FETAC level 5. We need to let people move up the education ladder. Research done recently by Delma Byrne on loan parents and access to third level education, for example, shows that in terms of the student cohort in third level, only 1% of them are lone parents. They are not getting a chance to progress up the ladder into education and training options that will get them jobs that are realistic in terms of moving them out of poverty. Unless we do that, and regardless of whether our activation policy pushes them into jobs, it will not matter because those jobs will not be good enough to lift them out of poverty. That is about ambition and attitude. It is not about the attitude of the lone parent. It is about the attitude of the State towards that lone parent and being more ambitious for her and her children.

What is ironic about the reforms and the cuts to lone parents benefit over the past ten years is that, by accident, we designed a jobseeker's transitional payment. In typical Irish style we did not set out to do it. We created a crisis of cuts to loan parents where we wanted to move them from the one parent family payment to jobseeker's benefit. The political reaction was very strong and the system was forced to come up with a stop-gap arrangement, and it came up with jobseeker's transition, but it has many positive features. For example, it is not as mandatory in terms of what happens with jobseeker's payments in that workers are allowed work full time or part time, the three day rule does not apply and the income disregards are better. We have created a space that has the potential to be a creative policy area. With the right investment, capacity and training of case workers I believe it offers potential for both lone parents and qualified adults, and even perhaps as models for other vulnerable groups, namely, asylum seekers coming in to work and people with disabilities.

To make that work, however, there are a few aspects that are important. Jobseeker's transition payment gives us an alternative approach to activation where people are allowed take their time and where we can be more ambitious about the level of education and training we offer but only if those options are available and if we invest in the selection and training of the case workers to ensure they are appropriate and have the right attitude to work with people. That is crucial. Much of the feedback we get from the Pathways to Work service is that it is dependent on the individual experience of people, and that is dependent on the attitude of the individual case worker. Some of that can be achieved by training but some of it cannot. It is about the person who is picked for the job and put into it. Serious issues arise in that regard in terms of the structure of the way Pathways to Work was put together.

Senator Alice-Mary Higgins asked about the five pilots for qualified adults. It is useful to consider doing those pilots but the issue is the case workers, the training and whether they are approached with the attitude of the jobseeker's transition space in terms of seeing what these qualified adults need and how we can open up a progression pathway for them or whether it is about getting them into the first low-paid job we can find and make them take it. They are two completely different worlds in terms of starting points for understanding what can be done about it.

There are a number of innovative proposals we could have about lone parents, qualified adults and other vulnerable groups that jobseeker's transition offers us a policy and institutional space to work in to be creative with, but only if we invest in the appropriate training for the workers and also the range of options, particularly education and training options rather than employment options, that give people the opportunity to lift themselves up over time. That is about the ambition of the policy for people and what the policy wants to achieve. Is it savings, getting people off the live register or welfare or well-being and a better quality of life in four or five years time? Which one do we want? Currently, it is clear that we want short, cheap outcomes and we are not putting in the level of investment, or the level of thinking or creativity, that could help us achieve the other ambition, which is better quality of lives over a longer timeframe. There were specific questions for Ms Whelan and Mr. Finn.