Mr. John Conlon:

In regard to the opening questions on dealing with the long-term unemployed, the capacity we have with JobPath and LES and whether that is required going forward, people need to remember that when we started designing JobPath, the number of long-term unemployed was colossal. At that stage our capacity to intervene and assist those people was very limited, as was the capacity of LES, and we were quite over-burdened. That is why we took the decision at that stage to contract an additional service so we could increase our resources and this would give us a ratio of case officers to unemployed that was more consistent with the ratio across Europe. We were far behind in terms of our capacity and ability to help the long-term unemployed.

That is the context in which we were then. We are now in a position where the case officer ratio, between the Intreo service, LES and JobPath, is somewhat at the norm the OECD would like to see for a case officer ratio when dealing with unemployed people, which is what we want to maintain. That is very important background because our case officer ratio to all unemployed, particularly long-term unemployed, was very poor in 2012, and that needs to be borne in mind when considering the policy context then, as well as where we are now and where we want to remain.