Results 1-20 of 42 for jobpath segment:7787001

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

...new system implementations. The Department will take all these recommendations on board in 2021. I understand committee members have expressed an interest in discussing issues related to false self-employment and the operation of the JobPath service. Both of these topics were the subject of detailed discussions at this committee and other committees in recent years. In order to...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: Good. On that basis, is that with a view to expanding the local employment service, LES, and winding down JobPath? Are both needed in tandem with each other?

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

...operational capability along with our own directly employed employment officers. To use a term which I suppose has come into public discourse due to the health crisis, we are trying to operate JobPath as our "burst capacity".

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: ...tremendous work over the years. It has faced many crises and dealt with a large volume of unemployment over many years. With regard to the process in which a jobseeker is referred to the LES or JobPath, how is it decided and who is decided by?

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: It is decided by the Department in the case of JobPath and primarily by the Department in the case of the local employment service. If I take JobPath as the example, and the same model applies to the local employment services, we look at people who have been unemployed long term, which is 12 months or more, and we do a random selection of people and refer them to a case...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: Specifically, is it the same individual in the Department who decides whether I go to JobPath or the local employment service? What are the criteria? I know Mr. McKeon has said it is random but surely there should be some sort of criteria internally, I hope there is, to decide how many people go to one or the other. The reason I ask is because there is obviously a cost. The State is...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: When we set up JobPath we committed to a minimum number of referrals over a four and a half year period and we have exceeded this number.

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

...up. We had to give it some commitment and we gave it a commitment of 240,000. We exceeded this and we always knew we would. Once we got that number there was no further issue. With regard to cost, JobPath, the local employment service and our own staff are all within touching distance of one another. JobPath is probably the cheapest if the cost is divided by the number of people who...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: So that I am clear, is Mr. McKeon saying in the first four and a half years of JobPath, the Department had a target to hit as part of the agreement between the Department and JobPath? What was that target? Mr. McKeon said it was exceeded.

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: It was 240,000 and in terms of the number of people who have gone on JobPath, I have the figure if the Deputy will bear with me. It is just under 300,000. It is approximately 285,000.

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: ...this point, there has been a feeling in the local employment service that perhaps it would be a sacrificial lamb in all of this, and that because of a contract jobseekers were being referred to JobPath rather than the existing employment service. Mr. McKeon said approximately 280,000 jobseekers have been referred to JobPath. How many were referred to the local employment service in the...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: Going back to my original point about the individuals deciding who goes where, obviously there was a financial incentive for the Department to refer people to JobPath instead of the existing service. Who decides this? What are the criteria they use?

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Cormac Devlin: From my knowledge, there is certainly capacity in the local employment service and I hope it will be utilised. From the Department's perspective, what is the cost of the referral of a jobseeker to JobPath versus the local employment service? Can it be drilled down to that level?

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

...of providers are different. We pay the costs of the local employment services. Therefore, it is a cost-recovery model. We agree the budget with the services at the beginning of the year. On JobPath, there is an outcomes-based payment, based on whether something is made work or not.

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: The average cost for JobPath at the moment is about €800 or €850.

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Verona Murphy: I thank all the witnesses for attending. I may have missed a point because I was concentrating on a question I was going to ask. What is the cost of the JobPath scheme? Mr McKeon said there were 285,000 participants. Does he have a figure?

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: I do. In 2020, we have spent about €49 million on JobPath. In 2019, we spent about €58 million. For the entire period of the contract to date, the figure is about €244 million.

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: It has because we have reduced referrals. We had started thinking about whether we would extend the JobPath contract. I do not believe it was ever an option not to have it burst capacity but it was a question of whether we would continue with the existing model and contract set-up. Obviously, in light of the developments this year, we need to extend the scheme, but the...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Mr. John McKeon: Of the 280,000 odd, 235,000 have completed their 12 months with JobPath. Some 64,000 of those progressed into work while on the scheme. We have retention in employment for different periods. At the moment, the measure for people retaining employment to 12 months is 22,000 but many of the people who got jobs have not got to the point where they could have retained them for...

Public Accounts Committee: 2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments (12 Nov 2020)

Catherine Murphy: I want to return to the JobPath scheme. I will try to be short in my questions as I have limited time, so I would like some short answers. JobPath is an outsourced scheme and it is performance based. A lot of the feedback I have got, and I have talked to Mr. McKeon about this before, is that people were directed towards the likes of the hospitality and security sectors and they were...