Mr. Joe Saunders:

I can briefly address the three other matters raised by the Deputy, beginning with the core costs. As the Chairman outlined, there is a very wide range, breadth and scope of activity that local development companies deliver on behalf of the State. There is a very small amount of philanthropic funding and it is fair to say more than 98% of income is from the State; it is a delivery arm of State services. Within that context, the sustainability of local development companies is not a given. Moreover, the sustainability of many companies is currently under threat.

Members should be aware that many of the programmes we deliver do not make an adequate contribution, if any, to core management or administration costs. We often take programmes for delivery based on the fact that there is infrastructure already available in the local development companies. There is an over-reliance on core programmes, such as LEADER and SICAP, in this regard to provide staffing, management and administration. As members have already heard, the SICAP budget is 50% of what it was in 2008.

Our argument is that if the State values this delivery of almost a third of a billion of programming in the social area each year, the viability of local development companies needs to be underpinned. That is currently not happening adequately. As part of the Government's sustainable, inclusive and empowered community strategy, of which we were a co-creator, in collaboration with a number of other colleague organisations in the NGO sector, there are commitments to core cost multiannual funding models. The progress on these must be accelerated and this must be addressed before any further difficulties are experienced.

With regard to the Tús programme and eligibility criteria, Deputy Ó Cuív was the initiator of the programme and is aware that it was designed in a time of high unemployment to provide work experience for those who were job-ready and had suffered in the previous recession. Employment figures improved prior to the pandemic and those on Tús were experiencing greater distance or barriers to entry into the labour market. The one-year experience on the programme was very valuable but in many cases people required a longer period.

Our first recommendation for Tús is to reduce the qualification period from three years to one year.

This is because many participants were being forced to leave the scheme and go back on unemployment payments, were distanced from the labour market and could not get back on for three years. Our second recommendation is that employment contracts be extended for participants identified as needing increased support to ensure their eventual progression. In many cases, this would need to be two or, possibly, three years. We recommend to update the eligibility criteria to increase access to the programme for other jobseekers, not only those on qualifying payments. Our third recommendation relates to the extension of employment contracts for Tús participants aged 62 or over who had little opportunity to go back into the open labour market but were providing vital community and also protecting their own health and well-being the programme with very little cost to the State.

On the final point regarding the LES programme, I suspect other members may wish to contribute on this as well. I will keep my comments brief. The LES is located in 26 contract areas throughout the country. There are large gaps. We would welcome any extension of that but, at present, we would say that the current providers are in a position to move in an agile way with a small budget increase. Currently, LES provision nationally is of the order of €18 million to €19 million. On the requirement to extend that nationally, non-LES companies - that is, the local development companies that do not have LES contracts - have rural employment services through SICAP and pre-employment services through Tús and the RSS. They have other projects and programmes which they are delivering as well. As a result, they could easily translate this into a wider LES-type provision for what we estimate to be a cost of €14 million to €15 million. That would bring the total cost for a national employment service open to all citizens to between €33 million and €35 million.