Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Department will spend close to €1.1 billion this year in a range of employment, education and internship schemes. The major scheme is the community employment scheme, with expenditure of close to €358 million. The back to work allowance accounts for close to €113 million, while JobBridge spending stands at €82 million. All modern economies invest in education, training and work experience with a view to developing people's careers over their working lifetimes. In addition, various European studies have shown that young people who are not in employment, education or training are seriously at risk of becoming long-term unemployed, with associated poor life outcomes.

JobBridge internships are designed to break the vicious circle whereby unemployed job seekers need experience to secure job offers but cannot gain such experience without a job. In the past, one of the barriers faced by job seekers in building up that experience was that they lost their social welfare payments if they took up work experience opportunities, as they were deemed to be unavailable for work. This problem was compounded by additional costs incurred, such as travelling to and from the location of their work experience. As Minister, I introduced JobBridge to remove these barriers and open up a new pathway to employment via internships.

I am pleased to say that since its launch in 2011, JobBridge has provided a valuable work experience and development opportunity to just under 30,000 unemployed job seekers, of whom approximately 23,000 have completed the programme. There are just under 7,000 persons currently engaged on internships. More importantly, independent research indicates that the rate of progression to employment via JobBridge is higher than under any other domestic scheme and significantly higher than comparable schemes elsewhere in Europe. The research found that 61% of interns entered paid employment within five months of completing their internships.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House

The research, published in April last year, also examined the displacement and deadweight impacts of JobBridge to estimate the value for money to the Exchequer of the scheme. In summary, the data indicated a displacement impact of just over 6%. The research indicated that JobBridge, based on 2011 and 2012 performance, and contrary to the suggestion in the question that it would give rise to opportunity costs, generated positive value to the Exchequer of approximately €15 million over a full year.

See this speech in context