Mr. John McKeon:

People often use the word "intern" and have a preconceived idea that it is a route into employment for professional graduates and the first step on the career ladder to becoming a professional. For people who are long-term unemployed and cannot even get an interview, an internship or work experience is a better term for this opportunity. Although a job might not be considered to be a traditional internship, it is just as valuable a way of getting back to work. Our case officers tell me they can use it very successfully to persuade employers to give a person a chance whom they would not have let through the door for an interview. If they ask employers to take these people on JobBridge, give them a chance, with the promise that they will work out, inevitably they do. The employers might not have given those individuals the benefit of an interview. We need to be careful not to have inverted snobbery about the type of job that is worthy of an internship. I qualify that by saying there are obvious examples, and the committee members have mentioned them, where we need to be very careful.

In developing the scheme, there have been calls on the Department to take a much more aggressive approach to reviewing advertisements and host organisations putting jobs up on the system. We have to get the balance right between making it easy for jobseekers and employers to use the scheme and preventing abuse. We have tried, pretty much successfully, to have a compliance and inspection regime rather than a verification at point of order regime. It is entirely voluntary. No jobseeker has to take up an internship. We are all aware of the case of 17 or 18 schools that put up jobs on the system which we took down as soon as they were brought to our attention. We are now working with the Department of Education and Skills to put in place a set of guidelines for schools telling them how to behave in future. We expect to finalise that in the next week or two.

We still need JobPath, even though employment performance is improving and unemployment numbers are falling. At the moment there are between 540 and 550 people on our live register for every case worker in the Department. That is notwithstanding the reduction in unemployment and the increase in the number of case workers. The upper limit recommended by the OECD is 200:1. We still have a long way to go before we would have sufficient resources to deal with what is still a peak, albeit a declining one, in unemployment. We need the capacity. We have built in several protections into the scheme in the event that this employment situation continues. We have not committed in our tender and will not commit in our contract to refer the estimated 100,000.

We will have to give a commitment, and what we said is 60%. We can vary that by location and by jobseeker type, so we are only committing to sending 60% of what we think we will actually need. That gives us some scope. We also built in price discounts. If the economy improves and the contractors find it easier to get people into work, we can reduce our prices by up to 16% to take account of that fact. We have built in protections against that. The other point to bear in mind is that when we talk about people on the live register, there is a whole cohort of people to whom we should start extending our services as the situation improves. People with disabilities have been mentioned and there are qualified adults who are not counted on the live register and so on. Every bit of capacity we can get, we will use.

With regard to the issues of cream-skimming and parking, it is correct that there have been a lot of criticisms of the British model. I think they have had five or six different versions since the new deal in the 1990s and with each version there have been criticism and difficulties. They thought they had got it right with their last version, but they had not quite done so. They built in a tiered payment structure, which we copied. They thought that would work because if providers were paid more money for dealing with somebody who was really distant from the labour market, they would not just park them. They would spend as much time and effort on them as they spent on others. We have copied that but have actually gone beyond it by specifying a service guarantee that is not a feature of the UK model. In the UK they call it a "black box" where a jobseeker is sent to a contractor and, again, not to put too fine a point on it, to a certain extent the state says it does not care what the contractor does with him or her. The contractor has to provide services to the jobseeker but can pick whatever services it wants to provide, whatever clients it wants and can do things its own way. The state then comes back in two years time and hopefully the jobseeker will no longer be unemployed. That provided flexibility for providers to pick and choose who they would deal with. We have specified a minimum guarantee that every person we refer has to get at least a minimum of a personal progression plan, some basic training in CV writing, job searches and interview techniques and a face-to-face meeting with an employment adviser at least once a month. The contractors cannot just park somebody, and if they do not fulfil the minimum requirements, they do not get paid. That is very clear in our tender. We have built in those protections.

The duration of our referral period is one year, while in the UK it is two years. That is really creating scope in the UK for people, perhaps almost unconsciously, to park individuals and say, "I will get back to them in a couple of months, I have two years to deal with them". In Ireland, the contractors have to deal with the people we refer to them within a year. They cannot get away from that. We have also built in customer satisfaction surveys. The contractors have to hit minimum levels of customer satisfaction across all client groups or they do not get paid. They have a minimum performance level. They do not get paid on an individual client basis unless they get that client a job, and unless they hit a minimum performance level which we have set, we will hold back payments across all clients. We will not hold back 100% of the payment, but we will hold back a good proportion of it. These are all things that will help address that issue.

On the issue of low-paid work and more precarious employment, which some of the contractors in the UK have been accused of promoting, under the UK Department of Work and Pensions's contract, employment is defined as 16 hours of work per week. The sustainment payment is paid every four weeks. We have defined work as 30 hours work per week, and the sustainment payment is made every 13 weeks, so the contractors have to get the jobseeker 30 hours of work a week for 13 weeks sustainment before they get a payment. In the UK, they could get the client 16 hours of work for four weeks and get a payment. We have made those changes and we are also encouraging providers to send people on training programmes. We have said we will stop the clock while somebody is on a training programme, so we will extend the referral period by the period of the training programme, up to a maximum of 26 weeks. In the UK, there was no training allowed. Under the work programme in the UK, contractors are not allowed send jobseekers to training.

There was a question about the saving mechanism and how we can be sure that the contractor has got somebody into work and that we are paying them. That was a problem in the UK. We will have a number of checks. The first is that the person for whom the contractor is claiming a job placement is no longer in receipt of a jobseeker's payment or any other welfare payment, for example, illness benefit or disability. However, we will also confirm through a commencement of employment notice and P35 returns that we get from the Revenue Commissioners that people are actually in work. We will build in those checks.

Senator Moloney asked how many people are kept on under the JobsPlus scheme. We currently have 3,000 people on the scheme. It is a bit early to go back and look over it. It would really need to have been in operation for at least a year.