Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I propose to take Questions Nos. 9 and 14 together.

The Pathways to Work strategy represents the single biggest ever change to how the State engages with and provides services to people who are unemployed. It is delivering on the programme for Government commitment to set up a co-ordinated employment and entitlements service and involves a multi-annual programme of complex legislative, organisation, process, people and work changes running to the end of 2014. There are five strands to the pathways approach, namely, engagement with people who are unemployed, the provision of activation places and opportunities, incentivising the take-up of opportunities, working with employers and reforming institutions. A key component of the strategy is to increase engagement with employers and to incentivise them to provide more jobs for people who are unemployed and are on the live register. A dedicated employer engagement unit was established in 2012 to co-ordinate the Department’s engagement with employers.

Experience shows employers are often reluctant to take on people who have a gap on their curricula vitae and this reluctance must be overcome if a pathway back to employment for unemployed people is to be offered. It is for this reason that I am particularly concerned to involve employers and to get their input into the pathways programme. I personally have hosted nine employer roadshow events at locations all over the country, which were attended by more than 2,000 people. In addition, the Department has hosted three job fairs and five breakfast briefings, as well as numerous briefings to industry representative groups and a significant number of meetings with individual employers. Moreover, this engagement is paying dividends, both in respect of the success of the JobBridge scheme to which reference was made earlier and in the use of the Department’s services by many small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, and by large firms such as PayPal, Meteor and Eishtec, based in Waterford, as well as by public sector bodies such as the Passport Office to recruit people from the live register into direct employment. This is because as vacancies arise, it is absolutely critical that those who are on the live register must be put in a position in which they can go for such vacancies. If one considers those who are on the live register as having been parked to one side and if employers do not look on them as being a key resource of this country, which this country has trained and educated, one will not get people who currently are unemployed back to work.

Thus far, with the new system we had 68,600 people in group engagements last year, while more than 40,000 people have benefited from such engagements this year. The Department conducted 158,000 one-to-one guidance interviews with jobseekers last year. The target is to complete 185,000 initial interviews in 2013. Significantly, under the Intreo model being rolled out, the process of engagement starts immediately. This is because I want the motto to be that the first day one signs on to be a jobseeker also is the first day on which the Department helps the person who has become a jobseeker to get back into work.

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