Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Pathways to Work 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 national employment and entitlements service and involves a multi-annual programme of organisational, process, people and work changes running to the end of 2014. We started in 2012 by rolling out the Intreo approach, including revamped offices, to improve how we engage with newly unemployed jobseekers through the use of individual profiling, group engagements, one-to-one interviews and personal progression planning. The first day a person signs on for jobseeker's allowance and receives a payment is also the first day we help him or her on the journey back to work.

In the six months to the end of June 2013, 62,300 people had attended group engagements, at which we inform people of the suite of assistance available, 83,000 people had attended initial one-to-one interviews and a further 78,700 had attended follow-up one-to one interviews. To date we have profiled more than 110,000 people on the live register and are on target to have profiled all people on the live register by the end of the year.

With regard to the long-term unemployed, we are prioritising access to schemes such as Tús, Community Employment and Gateway and training interventions such as MOMENTUM. They are also prioritised for referral to Local Employment Services, LES, and job clubs and have exclusive access to the new JobsPlus recruitment subsidy, which gives employers €300 cash back for employing somebody who has been unemployed for one year or more and €400 for somebody who has been unemployed for more than two years. Under JobsPlus we are incentivising employers to play an important part in helping people who are, unfortunately, on the live register, to get back to work.

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If they recruit people who are long-term unemployed, they receive a cash payment equivalent to about 25% of a typical starting salary. I have also established a new labour market council comprising employers, labour market experts and advocacy groups to advise the Department in the implementation and further development of such initiatives.

Our services for people who are long-term unemployed are managed by 300 full-time case officers in the Department, who also operate the new Intreo process, and by 150 employment mediators in the LES. In addition, we are redeploying a further 300 staff to help the long-term unemployed in 2013, of whom 160 have already been assigned and have commenced training, with a further 200 to be redeployed next year. This will more than double the number of staff.

The Department is at an advanced stage in the preparation of a tender to procure third-party services on a contracted basis to supplement its own resources. We have already engaged expert advisors to assist in the design of a contract model and issued a prior information notice and held engagement sessions with interested parties during the summer period. I expect the tender, which will be for a bespoke solution to suit the Irish labour market, to issue by the end of the year and contracted provision to be in place during 2014.

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