Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I listened carefully to the points he made. I will now read the formal response from the Minister for Social Protection before discussing the matter further.

It is important to acknowledge the excellent work that is done on the full range of work schemes, including community employment, Tús, the rural social scheme, RSS and the job initiative scheme, supported by the Department of Social Protection and the contribution that these schemes and their workers make to communities across the country. Work schemes such as CE are positive initiatives that enable the long-term unemployed to make a contribution to their communities while upskilling themselves for prospective future employment. At present, more than 20,000 places are available on CE schemes with a budget in excess of €350 million available to support them in 2024.

The Department of Social Protection funds CE, which is delivered by independent sponsor organisations.

In their role as funders of community employment schemes, Department officials have ongoing engagement with community employment supervisors and their union representatives to discuss operational issues and other matters of common concern. The Department is committed to modernising its service delivery and developing digital systems to support its functions.

Responsibility for community employment schemes transferred from FÁS to the then Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection in January 2012. The programme continued to be delivered on a legacy IT platform until 2017, when it was integrated onto the Department's IT infrastructure. As part of that implementation, a new digital service, welfare partners, was developed for organisations that engage with the Department, with a specific focus on providing an online digital service to community employment sponsors and other business partners. The welfare partners portal has been designed to be fully accessible, secure and responsive. It uses the Revenue online service, ROS, digital certificate for authentication and non-repudiation. Using the ROS digital certificate infrastructure on the welfare partners platform allows the Department to leverage the current ROS infrastructure, which is well established across the business community. Community employment was the first business service of the Department to use the welfare partners portal.

Since the service was launched in 2017, community employment sponsors have been able to complete individual learning plans, ILPs, for participants to submit wage, material and training budget claims and engage with the Department online. In this way, the new portal replaced the historical administrative practices, which were paper based and labour intensive. Over the period from October 2017 to the end of April 2024, community employment sponsors have successfully completed more than 2.3 million transactions on the welfare partners portal.

When the new service was rolled out, all community employment sponsors and supervisors were invited to attend specific information sessions, which were held nationwide, on how to use the welfare partners platform. A dedicated helpdesk was established to provide assistance to any sponsor groups having issues with the portal. In addition, sponsors and supervisors were provided with a welfare partners user manual and further guidance, including a frequently asked questions section, on www.welfare.ie. Each scheme also has a dedicated local departmental officer who is available to help with any further queries. If there are specific issues or difficulties with accessing and using welfare partners, the relevant community employment sponsor should contact the helpdesk or local departmental officer in the first instance.

I appreciate that the Deputy's question is not so much about the welfare partners system generally, which has been running since 2017, as it is about the change that was introduced in April this year. As he has outlined, that change makes the system more cumbersome, with the authentication process now involving a manual step of scanning in a signature. He considers it to be less secure than it was before and that it involves more work and a transfer of responsibility to the voluntary participants in the scheme. His query is specifically about a change that was implemented in the past couple of weeks and is causing a lot of trouble in practice. I am happy to hear any more he might have to say about it.

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