Mr. John Conlon:

Regarding costs, the €84 million that has been mentioned covers registration fees and job sustainment fees. I want to be clear, in that we do not pay any money in sustainment fees unless we have proof that people are in employment after 13, 26, 39 and 52 weeks. Job sustainment is the core objective of the way we make our payments. As to whether it is value for money, time will tell, but considerable savings are made on the live register when people are not signing on. When the JobPath project finishes, we will have to measure what we have spent on it overall against savings on the live register. We will be able to provide some analysis of that following our economic evaluation later this year. We cannot do that any sooner than the third quarter because we have a large amount of data to get through. Regarding our regional performance reports to date, finding out what people are doing longitudinally has involved a significant amount of data mining. In terms of whether JobPath has worked, the longitudinal results will be the key outcome. Considerable savings are being made in live register spending once people get into work. From a value for money point of view, that will be the test of whether JobPath has been successful.

Deputy Brady asked whether we were happy that we had learned lessons from the failures in the services provided in Great Britain in the early 2000s and start of this decade. We have put a great deal of work into learning from those schemes. In so far as we could, we have contractually provided for circumstances that would avoid those. I mentioned some of them in my opening statement in terms of ensuring that contractors could not pick and choose who they got, which was one of the main problems in the UK. We refer people to JobPath; the providers do not select. We refer all long-term unemployed people. In the initial phases, 75% of those referred had been unemployed for two years plus and had received no or limited activation services from us previously. This differed from the UK where those referred to the providers were not necessarily people who had been far removed from the workforce.

We are very conscious that by doing that and taking the selection criteria away from them, we will address a lot of the issues there.