Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am very conscious of the important role CE and other schemes play and the Minister and I want to support them as best we can. In addition to providing valuable occupational experience and training as a stepping-stone to employment for people who are unemployed, schemes such as CE also provide important, and in many cases essential, services to their local communities.

Given the strong labour market performance the number of unemployed people dependent on social welfare payments continues to fall. While this is very welcome it also means that the number of candidates available to CE schemes also falls. This creates an obvious challenge. Having said that, it is not an insurmountable one and working together with CE sponsors we can, and have, devised changes that will help the schemes to continue to support their local communities.

For example, following engagement with scheme sponsors the Minister and I announced a number of reforms and enhancements to CE last December and again in June of this year. These changes included a provision to allow CE participants who reach 60 years of age to remain on CE until they reach state pension age. We also updated the baseline year for CE to enable other placements to be extended. More recently, as part of budget 2023, we announced an increase of €5 per week or just over 22% in the weekly CE allowance. This increase is in addition to the increase in the core social welfare payments of €12 per week and this means the minimum payment on CE will amount to €247.50 per week. This is the lowest rate of payment and people with children or other dependants receive additional payments and these are also increasing as part of our budget measures. We also changed the candidate referral process. Schemes have been given new flexibility to allow them directly to recruit eligible candidates to fill 30% of places but are also mandated to accept and place at least 60% of people referred by Intreo. This is to ensure that places do not go unfilled when there are candidates available from the live register. Schemes have also been granted flexibility to extend individual placements and to retain existing participants in cases where no replacement is immediately available.

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