Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

At the outset I would like to thank Senators who made submissions when we were putting together the Action Plan for Jobs 2012. They will see that some of the suggestions put forward by Senators are reflected in the action plan and others are still under consideration. I reiterate that this is an annual process. It is not a case of producing our best thoughts and then retiring from the struggle. This will be a year in, year out process. We will be generating an action plan for jobs with specific measures we will take during the course of the coming year.

I do not need to tell any Senator the reason we have decided to put jobs at the core of the Government strategy. In the past three years we have lost 350,000 jobs, almost 15% of our workforce, and almost 80% of those are people under the age of 30. We are losing the sort of people we look to to build the strength of our economy in the future. That is a compelling case in terms of the reason Government should put this plan at the core of what we are about.

This plan is ambitious but it is realistically ambitious. It has set a target of 100,000 net new jobs - more people at work - by 2016 and a further 100,000 by 2020. It has also set the ambition the Taoiseach has repeatedly emphasised that we seek to have Ireland become the best small country in which to do business by 2016. There are other ambitions set out in the plan which those Members who want to go through programme can read. They are important statements of intent and are about what the Government is demanding. That puts a huge focus not just on one Department such as the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Employment but on the entirety of Government in that they all have a role to play. If Members ask me what is different about this action plan from what we have seen previously, the most important difference is that every one of the 15 Departments have contributed to this plan. A total of 36 agencies, not just from my Department but from agencies across the spectrum, have contributed.

In terms of what is also different about this plan, those Members who studied public service reform over the years and seen the production of glossy reports on the health strategy, the climate change strategy, the decentralisation strategy or many of the other myriad strategies that did not lack ambition will know that some of them were right while others were a bit misguided depending on one's opinion but they fell down on implementation. What is different about this plan is that it does not offer a big bang solution. It has ambitions but it does not pretend to be the magic formula. Instead, it is a workmanlike document about what we can do now that over the next 12 months will make it better for employers to take on people and make it easier for people to get off the dole.

The big change is that there is an absolute emphasis on implementation. Every one of the 270 measures has a quarter within which they are to be delivered during 2012, either in quarters one, two, three or four. From the Taoiseach's Department, with both my Department and that of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, making an input, there is a monitoring system where each Department, agency and Minister will be held accountable to deliver on time. That is a big change in the way we approach planning and delivery within the public service. It puts accountability at the heart of the process and is an important change, quite apart from what is in the document. It is a whole of Government approach and it will be delivered consistently and next year we will seek to introduce new measures that will match our ambitions. It is important that Senators see it that way to ensure that if they have ideas that will create opportunity, and there are people here from all walks of life who have experience, we want to hear about them, stress test them and see if we can implement them over the course of 2013 if they are not included in 2012.

In critiquing this action plan many people will say the core issue in the economy is demand. There is a validity in that. There is no doubt that we have a constrained public sector because we must reduce our borrowing and consumers are equally constrained by borrowing commitments that are bearing down on them, not to mention the economies they are being forced to make by decisions coming their way. We do not have the option of abandoning the borrowing targets we have agreed with the IMF and deciding to introduce an additional stimulus package. What we have to do is to box smarter with the resources we have, and that is the emphasis in this plan. We do not have the option of a big free-rolling Keynesian plan, about which we economists often talk, but we have the option to be smarter in the way we spend money, and that is important. For example, in terms of the strategic investment fund or NewERA, we are seeking to take amounts of money we have in the National Pensions Reserve Fund and, to use the financial phrase, to leverage up that money. In other words, for the €250 million we have put into the strategic investment fund from our resources, we are getting a matching €750 million from pension and insurance fund managers to match the money that the State is putting in. Suddenly starting from funds of €0.25 billion, we have €1 billion of funds available to invest in infrastructures, once they wash their face, as it were. The issue now is to find investments that can show a commercial return and that can draw down this money we have created in terms of a fund.

In the same way we seek in many other ways to leverage with small resources much bigger amounts. For example, the partial loan guarantee scheme, for relatively small money from the State, in terms of exposing ourselves to some risk in the bank books, can leverage a good deal off lending to small business. In the same way, with the micro finance scheme, with relatively small amounts of money, we can match that equity by additional funds that we can borrow. The banks will feel secure in lending to a microfinance fund when it has a good equity base. Much of what we are doing is seeking to leverage financially but also to leverage through smarter use of the resources we have.

For example, the idea that we will pull local authorities into the task of driving enterprise development in their localities is an issue, which I know from travelling around the country, that is generating some controversy That is an explicit decision. We are now determined that we will offer small business a high quality service. The traditional way was county enterprise boards dealt with the small business, Enterprise Ireland was in another space and there was a breach in the ladder between people who were supported by county enterprise boards and the next step of getting access to Enterprise Ireland. Many people would also express the view that there was also a sense that the local authorities were not sufficiently engaged in making it easy to set up business, keeping down the cost of rates and services and making the regulatory system easy. We seek now to bring all those pieces together. A local enterprise office will be located within and supported by the local authorities, bringing together the business units of local authorities, seeking to make it easier to establish in that area but also having seamless access to Enterprise Ireland as a centre of excellence. Enterprise Ireland will be developing the policy tools that can be applied at local level. We believe that this is a win-win scenario. Admittedly, it is challenging in its implementation and many people would say "our local authority is up for this". I believe they are. Senators know more than most the commitment of local councillors and local authorities, but we have to engage people. We cannot afford to have local authorities being seen as part of the problem, they have to be seen as part of the solution.

Other ways in which we seek to leverage new thinking is that for the first time Enterprise Ireland will invite players in niche areas of industry to form a cluster, which will then develop and provide support, with State resources, to drive that cluster to do new things. Our system has been criticised for having strong agencies but relatively weak companies. This is a chance for companies in niche areas to say "let us do something different, let us seek to shape the way in which our niche can develop and let us come up with ideas". This is an opportunity to do that. There will be an invitation from Enterprise Ireland for players in niche areas to come forward with their ideas.

An important element of what we are trying to do is to ensure that with money scarce we box smarter. We need to get more people and communities involved. With Senator Quinn present, it would remiss of me not to say that one of the elements of this plan is to examine how Chambers of Commerce and local authorities but also local communities can become more involved. Senator Quinn was very prominent in the local heroes initiative in Drogheda and several other towns.