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

I will try to address the issues in the round and then answer the specific questions. If I have missed any in my notes, the members might shout.

It is obvious that we all appreciate the services that have been provided by the LES and job clubs to hundreds of thousands of people down the years. We are appreciative of the services they have helped us to deliver. We have no intention of downsizing or changing negatively anything that they do.

To synopsise what I am hearing from members, they are happy in the knowledge that this forms part of the service offering that we will need. We value the experience, expertise and tailoring of services, which Senator Higgins eloquently described. We want to take advantage of that in future. The Chairman hit the nail on the head. When we develop the next generation of services, we must do so cognisant of the fact that the challenges facing some people now were not even around ten or 15 years ago.

There will be an array of services, but they will not be in competition with one another. We do not sit down and say that JobPath is better than the community employment, CE, scheme. It is not. It is just different. We must model services so that no two organisations, be they contractors for the State, our own people, host companies or so on, are doing the same job. We must recognise the skills, talents and capabilities of each organisation and send sections of society that are facing different challenges to those organisations that are most receptive to helping them get through them. That might mean CE during one period in an unemployed person's life before he or she moves to being CV ready. Someone may move from one service to another over the lifetime of his or her unemployment. I hope that the lifespan of his or her unemployment gets smaller and smaller.

We are aware of the changing factors and social difficulties that the people of this generation face. We must tailor and model our services going forward.

Last week, Deputy Brady gave me the opportunity to reiterate the fact that the budgets for our contracted services had not changed. Our intention is to model the next activation services that the State offers in a tailored way using the people, experience and expertise currently in place. The LES and our job clubs will form an integral part of that offering. I am as grateful for them as are most of the members present. I met them before Christmas and intermittently since January. I have told them that we could not have done what we did in recent years without them. By the same token, we could not have done what we did in the past five years without Turas Nua, Seetec, CE, Tús, RSS or SOLAS in terms of training or the back-to-education grants from the Department of Education and Skills that allowed people to return to full-time third level education.

No two people who are looking for work have the same set of challenges in their lives. Therefore, the services that we offer on behalf of the State must be wide and varied, and their next generation must be tailored and capable of being scaled up if, God forbids, something happens.

The Chairman is right about this being outside the generational services offering on which we are working. When I was before the committee last week, I suggested that we consider establishing an interdepartmental body to examine the daily and weekly challenges facing people from zero to 66 years of age and tailor a cross-departmental targeted approach to geographical black spots. We cannot tailor five services from the perspectives of activation, education and experience and capture all of the challenges of the families in question. More is needed. Once that is done, it should be a priority in where we move next.