Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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I appreciate the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, standing in for the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Humphreys, who is unavoidably absent this evening but I ask that the senior Minister would respond to me directly in the fullness of time on the important points I will raise. She, like the Minister of State, is passionate about rural Ireland and appreciates more than most the huge voluntary and community ethos that underpins our rural communities.

I am concerned by a series of unnecessary burdens on the community employment, CE, structure, that are deeply worrying and that are threatening the viability and continuation of many of these schemes. Following two major leaks of sensitive information, the Department of Social Protection quite rightly rolled out a new web portal called Welfare Partners for CE schemes in 2017. This was to enable both sponsors and supervisors of CE schemes to transact information swiftly and securely with the Department. The system uses the same means of State-backed authentication that allows select users to submit information using their advanced electronic signatures to both the Revenue Commissioners and the Companies Registration Office without the need for paper.

Up until 29 April this year, the system cleverly allowed supervisors to prepare and upload reports but subsequently required sponsors to log in and review the data before submitting, in a two-tier process, to the Department. I understand there was an initial transition period and supervisors were advised that change was coming in November last year. Supervisors flagged concerns and reservations but, alas, all fell on deaf ears. Now we have a truly laughable and Killinaskully-esque situation. It is now mandatory for all CE schemes to use the online secure portal, which is fair enough. However, supervisors are still required to hand-carry paper documents, solicit handwritten signatures from sponsors and rescan them. Then the scheme supervisors have to log in and electronically sign the same documents again. It makes absolutely no sense for the Department to decline an electronic signature, which has strong means of authentication, and accept a scan of a handwritten signature that may not have authenticity. This unnecessary situation is particularly burdensome for small, rural CE schemes. I was alerted to this by local councillor, Mick Cahill, who works closely with the Carrickedmond and Legan CE scheme, chaired by Philip Butler. That scheme is extremely fortunate to have a conscientious and dedicated supervisor in Stephen Kelly.

On 22 April, the Department directed that sponsors rather than scheme supervisors, as had been the case heretofore, were required to upload all supporting documentation for payroll with effect from 29 April. This alteration is a clear and further dismantling of the existing two-tiered process employed in the Welfare Partners portal and an unnecessary transfer of an office administration duty from the supervisor to the voluntary sponsor. What started out as a very good idea has been hijacked. The new system runs contrary to the Department's own policies on community employment corporate governance processes which were issued to CE schemes in 2019.

Why did the Department abruptly and unilaterally implement changes that transfer duties from a Government-funded agency to a local volunteer? Why is the Department refusing to engage with supervisors and CE schemes on this important matter?

Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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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.

Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister of State. I welcome the official response but he really cut to the chase in his closing comments. I have no issue with the welfare partners portal. Indeed, community employment scheme supervisors recognise it as a top-class piece of kit. The reality, however, is that a serious situation is evolving. There is an eminently sensible situation to the problem, which is that we should not fix what is not broken. The welfare partners portal has worked very well. It does exactly what it says on the tin and exactly what it is intended to do. It allowed the safe and secure sharing of sensitive information under the control of community employment supervisors, so long as supervisors merely had to log on and review the data before making a submission. It worked perfectly well. There is no need to fix what is not broken.

As I said, the Carrickedmond and Legan scheme in County Longford is a very good one. It has 15 participants in a disparate region across south Longford. It engages with nine community groups and covers Legan, Abbeyshrule, Carrickedmond, Barry, Colehill, Carrickboy, Taghshinny and Ballycloghan. I feel like Deputies Danny and Michael Healy-Rae as I am naming all these areas. They are important principalities in their own right across south Longford. The reality is that the life expectancy of this scheme is now threatened, with the funding suspended because the scheme sponsors are not able to engage with the new guidelines. They are simply unworkable. The scheme is going to run out of money in the coming weeks. This is a scheme that helped Abbeyshrule village to become a Tidy Towns national winner a number of years ago. Now the scheme is facing closure. That eventuality can be averted simply by doing exactly what the scheme advises and suggests should be done. What is needed is to continue to do what we did previously, which is allowing the scheme supervisors to manage and administer the welfare partners portal and requiring the scheme sponsors only to log in and approve the documents. That was what was done and what worked successfully for a number of years.

Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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I am aware of Abbeyshrule and the improvements that were made there through the community employment scheme. It is well known around the country. I appreciate the benefits of community employment schemes. I will take the specific issues the Deputy raised to the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O'Brien, to see whether he has any specific knowledge of them. He may engage directly with the Deputy, or the Deputy might engage with the Minister of State, through his office, to try to make progress on the matter. To date, the system has worked very well. There have been millions of transactions. I am glad the Deputy has taken the opportunity to let me know that a problem has arisen in the past few weeks. I will make the Minister of State fully aware of it and ask him to get back to the Deputy directly.