Mr. John McKeon:

With regard to the employment outcomes and counting jobs that people might have got for themselves, there are two issues. The first is that the work of an employment counsellor, whether with Intreo or JobPath, is to advise people on how to draft a CV, conduct a job search and do interviews. If they subsequently use those skills to secure employment, that is great and it is not something we should be concerned about. Distinguishing between people who are able to do that before they go on JobPath or because they were on the scheme is difficult. It is not the case that only jobs where a JobPath provider says employer A is looking for someone are counted. We have built that into our contract design because we knew 8.6% of people would secure employment anyway. That is why we set a target of 60% and the pricing was based on hitting that. However, it includes all jobs; it does not only include the uplift. The contract design and the pricing, therefore, accounts for what one might think is dead weight. It accounts for the people who would have got a job anyway. If we only focused on those who would not have got a job, the pricing would have been higher. We have captured that in the pricing model.

Parking and creaming was one of the big concerns that came up during the consultative process. This concern applies to all activation services, including Intreo and LES. Case workers by their nature want to work with people who want to be worked with and they try to keep those who do not want to be worked with or who are more difficult away. It applies, therefore, to contracted and non-contracted services. In the contracted space, we try to manage this. I do not say it is perfect. Nothing is perfect but we have done our best. We are the only people who get the select referrals. The JobPath providers have no say in who they get to work with. Different pricing levels are set for people, depending on their level of duration, which is a proxy for the people who are more difficult to find a job for and those for whom it is easier to find one. Incentives are built in to work with the more difficult unemployed cases.

There are also customer satisfaction surveys. If we get feedback from customers that they are not meeting satisfactory scores, there are payment penalties. We track that the personal progression plans are in place and that all the milestones are being hit in the engagement with the employers in our IT systems and, therefore, we know the individuals are being worked with. I do not know if people are trying to game this at the fringes but we have done our best and we could not have done better. It is notable that other public employment services are copying what we have done. Officials from a number of foreign services have come to Ireland because they heard about this and they said we had done it better than elsewhere. I am not trying to blow our own trumpet but we have done what we can to address it.

With regards to returning to the Intreo system, all the data come back when the person comes back. If somebody wants to go into education rather than JobPath, once he or she is selected for JobPath, the policy is he or she must work with the JobPath adviser and he or she is must stay with JobPath for the next 12 months. That does not exclude exceptions from time to time but they are not the norm and we do not want to create a situation where they become the norm. Employment outcomes from job search assistance and employment advice are superior to employment outcomes from education. I understand that is a simplistic statement-----