Mr. Donal Coffey:

I work as a mediator in the Cork city local employment service, LES. My colleague is Ms Caroline Kennedy from PAUL Partnership, and she is a jobs club leader. We are going to split the presentation between us.

I thank the committee for inviting us to speak. We are here as representatives of the SIPTU local employment service, LES, and the jobs clubs national committees, which represent our colleagues throughout the country. The committees comprise partnership and non-partnership LES and jobs clubs. The history to our being here is as a result of meetings we have had with Deputies Brady and O’Dea and we thank them for facilitating our attendance today, which is much appreciated.

As background, we have written to the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection on a number of occasions requesting a meeting to discuss the proposal of her Department to replace the community-based LES and jobs clubs with an open, public competitive procurement model for future provision of services. We eventually received a reply offering an opportunity to meet an official from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. This meeting took place on Wednesday, 20 March, and the Department official was accompanied by two colleagues.

Our presentation sets out the reasons both the LES and jobs clubs should remain as a not-for-profit model within the community. It is an honour to be invited to Leinster House in the same year that Dáil Éireann celebrates its centenary. The LES and the jobs clubs may not have been around for 100 years but we are approaching the quarter century, having been set up in the mid-1990s, and the end document refers to 1991. We have been very much a front-line, person-centred service. We have always operated in a not-for-profit structure and are an integral part of our local communities. We would like to give the committee a brief history and background to the LES and jobs clubs and to describe how we operate.

The interim report of the task force on long-term unemployment of February 1995 laid out the template for the LES, which led to the jobs clubs model being developed to compliment and support the service. The report has survived multiple key marks and the clearing out of our offices, and it is our bible. In fact, it has multiple parentage in the sense that it crossed two Governments, given the early 1990s was a fairly tumultuous time, and there are many claims to the success of that document. The report reads: “The aim of the Local Employment Service would be to provide the gateway or access point to the full range of options which should be available to enable a long term unemployed person return to the world of work – these include guidance, training, education and employment supports”. Although many years have passed since the publication of this report, the values and the ethos it set down for the new service back in 1995 still very much prevail to this day, in particular being client-centred and responsive to the individual needs of clients.

It has been these clear values and operating ethos that have enabled us to be a successful service. Time and again, we have been able to adapt our operating procedures to changing circumstances and official requirements while remaining constant to our overall values and operating ethos with a view to increasing a person’s potential employability.

We are the gateway for unemployed persons because of our location within areas with typically high unemployment levels. We are ideally located when people come looking for support or wish to undertake short job market training courses such as Safepass or forklift driving, for example. Many of our long-term unemployed clients have been able to escape long-term unemployment and re-enter the world of work by undertaking such courses. A significant percentage of those who use our services to access programmes such as the community employment scheme and Tús will gain full-time employment thereafter. The LES and job clubs did not set themselves up to be the experts in all of these diverse areas. The aim was to establish effective networks with all key stakeholders and other service provider. The network approach has continued to the present day.