Mr. Bernard Fennessy:

I am the chair of the national jobs clubs committee. I am also a jobs club facilitator and I operate on the ground. I am also representing my local employment service colleagues.

The model that has been proposed for dealing with long-term employed will not work. People are long-term unemployed for a reason. While the contract states this will be a four-year contract with a review after three years, really you will get a year with a long-term unemployed person. If unemployed persons have come through all the different sections already, there will be a lot of unwinding required for them before we can get them focused and back into what should be sustainable employment. We have 25 years' experience in this area and we know the model provided will not allow us to achieve turnaround in that time. From that point of view, this model will fail to deal with people who have been unemployed a long time for a reason. It takes time but it has been proved again and again that if you put time into these wonderful people, you will get the turnaround. The bottom line is that the barriers are so deep that it would be impossible for us to work with them in that way.

The people on the ground who deliver the service have never been asked by the Department how to run the service. Would it not make sense to ask the people on the ground with 25 years' experience how to put a better service together? It strikes me that the Department did not ask us for a reason, that being it would not get the answer it wanted.

I thank members for their backing but we need people to listen and we also need an all-inclusive engagement.