Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his presentation. I start with the business cost issue. I welcome the proposal to provide rate relief for 95% of businesses. We will be delighted to see the detail when it comes. However, as he rightly pointed out, the backdrop to this is the 12.5% increase in the minimum wage, 1.5% in auto enrolment coming up the tracks and five days' sick pay. I suppose employers look on that as a 2% increase in pay. It presents real problems to enterprises with low margins and high payrolls. As we continue to progress, the living wage will increase again, the auto enrolment will increase again and the leave days will increase again. While this is very good and a broad-based measure, does the Minister need to consider tailored measures for businesses likely to be particularly exposed? That was being considered by the Low Pay Commission, and I think they threw the ball back into the Minister's court as to how that might be done.

I also ask about progress in the take up of apprenticeships. We see huge labour shortages, we see the need for permits and I recognise those. It is disheartening to see that even though there are now 80 apprenticeships covering a range of new areas - where traditionally there were 26 - the take up by sectors is low. That cannot be avoided, and they only represent one fifth of all apprenticeships in these new areas that have been opened up. This should be triggering a response from the associations representing employers, and who should be creating funnels to perhaps bring a lot of smaller employers together who do not have the time to get involved in bureaucracy. There could easily be a sectoral initiative to take up each of these between 48 and 50 new opportunities. I think that needs to be kickstarted, not from the Department of further education, but from the Minister's Department.

I have a question about business start-ups. In the long term this will be the backbone. In the crash it was the backbone, and 100,000 jobs were created by start-up Irish businesses in the most difficult years of the crash, which we are all glad are behind us. We then put in place a strategy for start-ups. I think that deserves to be revisited, to see if we are actually creating the environment within our education system, our taxation system and within the enterprise support sectors. I know the changes made to the LEO are welcome.

We should have a hard look at the high performance start-up programme. It is supposed to generate companies that lead to a certain scale. I suspect that if we examine those, they are not performing quite as well as we would have thought. It is well known that some of those companies end up being acquired for different reasons, which are sometimes valid and sometimes not. These are issues we need to have a strategic look at afresh because they are very important.

I have last year's key performance indicators, KPIs, for the Department. What is very noticeable is that none of them is in the green preparedness area. There is one on the take-up of the online trading scheme, but it is not in the wider digital adoption area. We have an issue about how we handle data centres and whether we can make them renewable, fit them into the pressure points on our grid system and make them part of a balanced response to green challenges. That can be done, but it needs a strategy and thought from the Department

We had the departmental agencies in talking about the green challenges. Only 1% of enterprises were taking up any of the schemes available from Skillnet, SEAI, Enterprise Ireland and local enterprise offices. That is very low. Over ten years that builds up to perhaps 10% but we are still completely off where we need to be. Sustainability is the future competitiveness test for a small trading country like Ireland. To find such low take-up is worrying. The Department should be putting in key performance indicators for its agencies and thinking about how to create a collaborative, cross-sectoral drive to make that happen. I have frequently advocated for the need for sectoral compacts in the area of the circular economy, which spans many of those green elements. It has been done successfully in Holland and we should be doing it here.