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

I will start with SICAP. It was an open competition with public tender. When I mentioned lessons could be learned from it, I meant in the structure of the tender, the lot size and the awarding criteria. It was an interesting process and we have learned from that. We will take cognisance of those lessons when we are doing our own tendering process. The only advice I get as a Cabinet Minister is from the CSSO and the Attorney General. I am bound by that advice and I have been told there are no derogations regarding public procurement in EU legislation regarding my ambition for publicly tendering for service offerings. I accept that advice. As is normal, I will certainly not be issuing copies of advice intended for me and the Cabinet. I am bound by that advice but I agree with the reasons underpinning it and the model itself.

I state again to Deputy Brady that there is no need to be fearful. Regarding services we need to offer in future, there are more than enough people for the service offering we have today. I refer to the 77,000 people long-term unemployed, the 42,000 people on CE schemes and anybody else who wants to work and who is not on the live register. That is before we even tweak the system. There are enough people to continue using the contractors we have into the future. Our ambition is to tailor and tweak the services we are currently offering to suit the requirements and needs of people not being fulfilled in every way they could be today. We also need to recognise that the challenges unemployed people face in the future will be slightly different.

For about a year after I became Minister the case was often made to me that the sole reason for the decrease in CE applications was JobPath. We changed the legislation last June to allow anybody on JobPath to be part of a CE scheme, if that is what the person wanted to do. We still have, however, a large number of vacancies on our CE schemes despite there being no restrictions preventing anybody on JobPath applying for and participating in a CE scheme. I can only conclude that the tens of thousands of people I was told were on JobPath who apparently wanted to do CE schemes have either gotten jobs, as part of the roughly 47,000 people now in work again, or are happy to continue with JobPath. Applications have not been made in the kind of numbers Deputy Brady and his colleagues presented to me previously.

We do have an issue at the moment with CE placement. It is not as simple, as Deputy Brady seems to think it is, as having thousands of people on the live register and thousands of vacancies in CE schemes. We cannot just make people go onto CE schemes. That is not the way we work. People have to apply for CE jobs and they can only do that if that is what they want to do. We are certainly not in the business of making people apply for work experience if that is not what they want to do. We are in the business of recognising that no one-size service is going to fit everybody's needs.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will develop and design a range of services that will be sufficient to provide a level of service support, activation, encouragement, mentoring, training and everything else that is required to help people who are out of work in the short, medium or long-term. This will ensure they have a State service they will fit into nicely and be able to work with at the various stages of unemployment to get them back into long-term, sustainable and supported employment.

Deputy Brady stated that we had removed people from educational courses and training schemes and placed them on JobPath. That is categorically not true. People in training, on an educational scheme or doing a course in college do not appear on the live register. The only people we send to JobPath are those who have been on the live register and have been under-employed or unemployed for more than 12 months.

The Deputy commented that we should beef up the numbers being sent to LES and JobPath. The outcomes, expertise and excellent service we achieve are possible because the ratio of clients to case management teams in the local employment services and job clubs is below the best practice maximum. According to international best practice, the ratio should be not more than 120 clients to one service case officer. At the moment, the ratio is probably around 100 in all of our contracted services, including Intreo. We have the capacity to scale up the number by about 20. I have no doubt that when we start offering services to people with a disability who are not on the live register and those in jobless households who are registered as qualified adults as opposed to being on the live register, we will have more than enough people to increase the average ratio from 100:1 to 120:1. If the Deputy is suggesting I should overload the local employment schemes by raising the ratio to 200:1, they would be overwhelmed and unable to offer the level of service they have been able to offer in recent years. We have a capacity of 800 case managers and we need each and every one of them. We have no intention of diminishing the services, particularly at a stage in the country's cycle when we are about to try to expand the range of people to whom we offer those services.