Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to raise the issue of the important work being done in communities by local employment services and the great deal of uncertainty within those communities in respect of the indicated tendering process. It is not an unfounded concern because many of these partnership companies, or local development companies as they are often called, bear the scars of the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, process. That programme was often the other arm of the partnership model. I am mentioning partnership repeatedly because partnership was a response in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the problems that were happening in many communities. It was a way of ensuring agencies such as the HSE, education and training boards and the Department of Social Protection, along with local politicians and the community could come together with business and the trade union movement to ensure we could respond to the needs in communities. It is a model that did not come out of nowhere. It did not arrive on our doorstep as some theory-based model. It is a model that was championed by many people and is so important to communities. I will speak about why that is so in a moment.

The difficulty arises in the context of each Department seeking to comply with tendering processes and other measures. I was present at the meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts this morning when the Secretary General of the Department of Social Protection spoke about how these contracts are regarded as non-compliant procurement. The difficulty is that as we start to ensure they all comply with tendering regulations,we are separating out the local decision making each of the partnerships is able to make. That will strip away the flexibility in SICAP and local employment services. It will move from a local service to a regional service and suddenly it will have lost all the benefits the partnership model had.

I refer to the fears of local providers. None of them has any difficulty tendering but they have doubts regarding the need to tender to comply with European regulations. That is a legal issue. When the Attorney General says something, I have to listen and the Government has to listen, but there are differing legal opinions on this issue.

If we go though with the tendering process, we need to make sure that process recognises the expertise of many of the existing service providers and rewards them for it, compared with another company that does not have the same local knowledge. The process must ensure there is a pay and fee structure that is not all about progressing people to employment, because that means the quality work cannot be done that often needs to be done with people who are exiting long-term unemployment. We must make sure partnership bodies have the cash flow they might need to switch from the current system, in which they are paid per year, to one in which they would not be paid upfront but after the progression has been made.

It is crucial that the ability to react locally to local issues is retained. It must not, for example, be solely about referrals from the Department of Social Protection; there must be the ability to allow walk-in referrals as well. We have seen how this type of local response is crucial in communities, which I will speak about after the Minister of State replies. It is the backbone of what partnership is and the backbone of what these organisations do. If we continue to nationalise, through contracts, the different models they provide, we open ourselves up to the allegation that some of us in government are ideologically focused on a particular way of delivering a service rather than on delivering for the community.

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