Mr. John McKeon:

Thank you, Chairman, for the examples. I agree that the local employment service is a good service. We commissioned the Indecon report - it was commissioned by the Department. We have maintained expenditure with the local employment services throughout this period. They have received approximately €100 million during the period. JobPath got €244 million. We are increasing the budget for the local employment services for next year and we are expanding the services. I agree with the comments from the Chairman on the local employment services.

I have to say I would encourage people to look at the data on the JobPath service. As part of the contract management, we commission regular surveys by an external agency of customer experience with JobPath. We publish the surveys. The surveys are of 1,000 people randomly selected. They are statistically valid. It is not an invite where people come in on a website and let us know their experiences. The 1,000 people are randomly selected and properly surveyed. The results are statistically robust. The results of these surveys are equally as glowing as the reports the Chairman has got on the local employment services. I am stating this as a fact rather than making any comment one way or the other. That needs to be taken into account.

I would also say that the employment outcomes from JobPath are somewhat higher than the Chairman has indicated. As I have said, some 64,000 people started jobs out of the 235,000 who were eligible. That is approximately 27%. I can tell the committee that the employment progression rate of that group of people is typically 8% or 10% because we are looking at long-term unemployed people. It is a significant increase. Deputy Carthy was not here earlier but I can tell the committee that the cost of JobPath is between €800 and €880.

The cost for a local employment service to provide a roughly equivalent service is approximately €1,000 per person. The cost for our internal staff is approximately €1,200. Cost parameters indicate it is a good service. I know there are concerns about it. Many of the concerns about JobPath may have been based on bad experiences of similar schemes in the United Kingdom. What I would say about the JobPath providers in Ireland is that one of them is 100% owned by a farmers' co-operative and is not a commercial enterprise. We have people with similar backgrounds running local employment services.