Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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38. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the number of persons who have been subject to sanctions and penalties for non-engagement with employment and activation schemes or measures from 2014 to 2016, inclusive, and to date in 2017; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [18240/17]

Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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The question is self-explanatory. I am concerned about the connection between the activation systems that are in place and compulsion. Rather than having a link between both, they appear to be two sides of the same coin. That is the reason I asked for the figures.

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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My Department is committed, under Pathways to Work, to incentivise the take-up of activation and job opportunities, including implementing sanctions for failure to engage with the activation process. The Social Welfare Act 2010, enacted in December of that year, provided for the introduction of reduced rates of payment to people who did not engage with the State’s employment services. Reduced rates of payment are a means of encouraging jobseekers to engage with activation measures and to take advantage of the supports offered by the Department to co-assist them in securing employment. Reduced rates are only applied where a jobseeker fails to engage as requested - and following at least two warnings - with the Department’s employment services.

There are long-standing and separate, unrelated sanctions to deal with failure by a jobseeker to comply with and satisfy the qualifying conditions relating to the jobseeker scheme. Those conditions are being available for and genuinely seeking work. A range of sanctions, including a full payment suspension or disallowance of the jobseeker claim, can be applied in circumstances where this condition is not met. In the interests of natural justice, a jobseeker who fails to participate in the activation process is given both written and verbal warnings and an opportunity to comply before a reduced rate of payment is applied. Furthermore, jobseekers can, through co-operation with the activation service of my Department, benefit from early re-instatement of the full rate of jobseeker’s payment.

The legislation underpinning the application of reduced rates of payment is the Social Welfare Act 2010. All decisions on the application of reduced rates of payment are made by deciding officers of the Department and are based on all the available evidence and the circumstances of each case. The jobseeker can appeal the decision through the social welfare appeals office. The number of cases where reduced rates have been applied is detailed in the table I have provided. Typically, reduced rates tend to last for a relatively limited duration of only a few weeks and at any given time approximately 1,200 jobseekers are on a reduced rate of payment. This number must be viewed against the approximately 300,000 people who are subject to activation in a given year and come within the scope of the reduced rate provisions of the 2010 Act. At any given time, it might be 0.4% of jobseekers who face reduced payments.

Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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The figures available to me indicate that in 2011, 359 people were subject to sanctions and penalties for non-engagement with employment and activation schemes. That trebled to 1,519 in 2012, it reached almost 3,400 in 2013, 5,325 in 2014, 6,743 in 2015 and from January to December 2016 it rose to 10,428. That is an increase of 2,300% in five years. All of this has happened while unemployment has been falling, so the percentage of jobseekers who have been subjected to sanctions has increased by perhaps twice as much as 2,300% since 2011. I acknowledge that there must be sanctions in some cases, but it appears that people are being forced into low-paid, insecure jobs that do suit them. They are jobs in which they end up worse off as a result of having to travel to work and so forth. I have encountered people who were forced to undertake training and education courses in which they have absolutely no interest and which they never intend to use. If they do not undertake them, they will be penalised. We have made many recommendations to the Minister on this. An activation service is not a sanctions regime. While there must be sanctions, there surely must be some controls to ensure that people are not forced, for the benefit of employers, into low-paid jobs or into education and training courses that are not suitable for them.

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Even at a time of relatively low unemployment, there are still 300,000 people who come on and off the live register in a given year. Of those, perhaps 10,000 might be subjected to reduced payments. It is a very small percentage of people who have their payments reduced. It is not as if it is 10% or even 5%. It is considerably less than that, so it is important to bear that in mind. There are two reasons that there has been an increase in the frequency with which penalty rates have been applied, and there has been an increase. First, this provision only commenced in 2010 when it was introduced by the then Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, in the Act to which I referred earlier. It was always going to start off at a lower point than where it ended. The second reason is that there is far more one-to-one engagement. When there was a large number of jobseekers, and Intreo had not yet been established and JobPath had not been contracted, there was little one-to-one engagement. Now, it is far more common so there has been an increase in the number of those sanctioned. I do not anticipate the number escalating much further. It will probably stabilise this year in the 10,000 to 12,000 range.

Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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It might only be a small percentage of the overall number of jobseekers, but the numbers have still increased quite dramatically. It is a sword of Damocles that hangs over the head of every jobseeker in the country. Has the Minister carried out an assessment of the impact the sanctions have on compliance and employment? Has he assessed the quality and sustainability of the type of employment being offered? Has he put safeguards in place, or is he considering putting them in place, to mitigate the impact that sanctions might have on households where there are children, for example, or those considered to be vulnerable?

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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There are safeguards already. Under the previous regime, one's payments were stopped altogether if one was determined not to be genuinely seeking work. Under this regime, payments are only reduced by a certain amount and the payment in respect of a child is never reduced, nor is the payment in respect of a qualified adult. The secondary payments, such as the fuel allowance, are not affected. It is only the payment to the main person in the household of a jobseeker that is reduced, not the child or dependent adult payments or the secondary payments. However, I intend to examine, for my own interest as much as anything else, a breakdown or profile of the reasons for sanctions and of the people who have had sanctions applied to them. I have asked for that but I do not have it yet.