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

Yes. If I am here for long enough, I would have no problem doing so, but if we get this body of work done in the next couple of months, we need to consider putting a cross-departmental task force together immediately afterwards, or perhaps even in tandem, to examine specific geographical areas. There could be a proof-of-concept pilot. If it can get better outcomes for 1,000 people within 12 months, it might be a model with which we can move forward. I am willing to do that. The national action plan for inclusion is being launched in May. If we can work between now and then on developing a pilot, that would be a great time to launch it.

The Chairman mentioned a new range of programmes, but they are not new. We have a range of services offered by a range of contractors. Some of them are fabulous but some could be better, given their skill sets and the need to reach people whom we have never reached before. We need to enhance and empower services. We are not getting rid of youth employment services, over 55s services, CE, Tús or RSS, but tweaks can be made to address specific challenges and enhance our offering. That is what I hope to do with the Department in the coming months.

Senator Higgins discussed how we measured outcomes. The same metric that is used for her is not used for Senator Nash or Deputy Brady. The outcome is the provision of a pathway back to work and sustainable, happy and fulfilling lives for those we service. The Senator is right about there being some people on the live register who need a more holistic wraparound service to help them get from where they are to where we want them to go. For some, that might take three years. For others, it might take seven years. It can only be determined by each person's willingness to work and co-operate with the services, assuming those services are tailored to that person's set of needs. Measuring outcomes in CE will not be the same as it is in Tús, JobPath, LES or job clubs. Outcomes are measured in the fulfilment of the person's needs. For some, that might just involve learning the capacity to understand that they need to show up at the same place ready for work every day. A service might need to train someone to develop learning skills, teach people a different language and so on. Some people will have a specific set of requirements on day 1. By year 2, they might have a different set of requirements. Different factors and outcomes for different levels of service are required to get people from where they are, which is long-term unemployment, into long-term, sustainable and supported employment. That range of services will be designed in the coming months. We will also tweak existing services to ensure that we fill every gap.

Thankfully, the live register figures are reducing, with numbers on the long-term live register decreasing at an even greater speed. More importantly, they are doing so faster than in our European counterparts. Given the current capacity in our system, this allows us to reach people who are intergenerationally unemployed and to address their issues. It also allows us to reach people who are not on the live register but who want to work and just need access to the range of supports and educational opportunities. It allows us to stretch our offering to reach a much wider audience. This is not just about apple pie and love. We are reaching the stage of not having enough people to fill the job vacancies being created by the economy, so it is in the country's interests to encourage people who are not working but who are not on the live register to participate in the economy. We must provide whatever services we can to ensure that it is an easy and supported journey for them.

The most serious message that I should get across today is that our services are not in competition with one another. That one has an outturn rate of 28% versus another's 25% or 9% or CE's 37% does not mean it is a competition. Each person attending a body for assistance has different needs. If the metric was the number of people who got a job within one year, some organisations would be excelling and others would not, but that would not take into consideration any of the challenges facing the people we have sent to those organisations. This is not about competition. It is about having an array of services that suit individuals' needs at a particular time in their lives. As long as I can offer a full range of services that complement one another, that provide someone attending an Intreo office a choice depending on his or her social challenges, difficulties or barriers to employment, and that find that person a niche and allow him or her to progress to other services or into work directly, getting that right will be a measure of success.

I think that will be a measure of success, if we can get that right. It will not be easy because, as I said, the people who are presenting have a variety of different issues but it is our job to provide services at the best level we can.

The biggest message I am hearing today is that the committee's concern and nervousness is over public procurement, so I will be very honest and brutal. EU procurement rules apply to everybody except those services to which they do not apply. The legislation, as advised to me by both the Chief State Solicitor's Office and Attorney General, is to the effect that, much and all as they and the committee would want it to be otherwise, the Irish Local Development Network, ILDN, local employment services, LES, and our job clubs do not come under that derogation. They have to be attributable to the EU procurement laws, as does everybody else in the country.

That is not something to be afraid and fearful of. If that is the only thing the committee is concerned about, even though it is not necessarily a message that we are getting from interactions with people from LES, and job clubs, then it genuinely has nothing to be concerned about. Our job is to provide for the 77,000 people who are long-term unemployed, the 45,000 people who are on community employment schemes and want to progress into sustainable employment and those hundreds of thousands of other people who are not on the live register but potentially could be in employment if the proper services were available. There is much work to be done at a tailored and detailed level. People are facing different challenges today, and will do in the future, so we cannot offer the services that we intend to offer to the far too many people who are unemployed without the procurement of LES and job clubs. We must ensure that we continue to use their expertise and employment skills in the future. We must tailor our plans and models. They will not be the same because some people will be looking for a certain type of service and others will be looking for a different type of service but there will be a place for all our service providers in the future.

Deputy Brady asked specifically whether I intend to contract JobPath in the future. What I currently intend to do is to fulfil the contract we have, which runs until 2021, and what we decide for the future is totally dependent on the outcome of deliberations we will have with each other over the coming weeks as to what kinds of services we need to offer. I ask the committee to ponder the fact that the 48,000 people who got work in the past number of years because of JobPath did so because of that particular model. I do not know how many of them would have got jobs without that help but I am sure we did not have the capacity to look after those people within the system, through our own offices and those of our service providers, before 2015. We were incredibly stretched which is why we introduced the new Intreo model and contracting services on a pay-for-performance model because it works as part of a mix of services. That is international best practice. That is not the only service, nor will it ever be.

There are 48,00 people currently going through JobPath to whom we have a responsibility. We will fulfil the contract with JobPath before we make decisions, in the next couple of weeks, as to what the next generation of services will look like.

Senator Nash asked if I could give him a timeline, if we are wedded to tendering, but and I cannot do that. We are currently in breach of the EU legislation and have been for the past number of years. I am not rushing to confirm a tender next Tuesday. We need to know for what we are tendering. I cannot do that specifically until we know exactly what kind of services we want, and the range of them. We will work in co-operation with LES over the next couple of months to find out what extra capacity and skillset they have that we have not heretofore been utilising. Senator Higgins alluded to some of that.

We will decide in the next couple of months on the best level of service offerings for training, employment and activation services we need to give to the next generation of unemployed Irish people. We will then work with the services we have to allow those people consider which ones they want to work with and fulfil. It will not take years but it will not take weeks away either. We need to ensure we get it right for the next generation, rather than for the next couple of years, and that the services we offer are based on the experiences we have today. There is a reduced number of people on the live register but we have extra capacity within the current system to extend the services we currently offer and, indeed, future services we offer to people who heretofore we have not offered services.