Seanad debates

Tuesday, 21 March 2017

JobPath: Statements

 

2:30 pm

Photo of Leo VaradkarLeo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

She wants to insist that Northern Ireland remains in the European Union. What is the European Union about? A fundamental principle of the European Union is the four freedoms - movement of capital, labour, services and goods. Any EU company can bid for a contract in other parts of the EU. Once again, Sinn Féin has a two-faced approach in which it is determined to keep Northern Ireland in the European Union but they do not want the European Union to apply to anything we do, particularly as regards Government contracts. That makes no sense to me.

Senator Craughwell said education and training boards, ETBs, were very good and should have a role. I agree with that and the Department has a lot of involvement with ETBs, particularly with Springboard and with people on the back to education allowance. The education and training boards are about education and training, however, while JobPath is about activation and recruitment. They are very different services.

Senator Dolan mentioned people with disabilities and he will be aware of some of the programmes we have in this area. For example, the wage subsidy scheme subsidises employers for the cost of employing people with disabilities and there are adaptation grants for employers to adapt their premises so that they can hire more people with disabilities. It is an area where we can do an awful lot more. Professor Frances Ruane has just finished her Make Work Pay report, which will be published in the first two weeks in April and will assess the enormous barriers to employment for people with disabilities, such as the fear of the loss of a medical card or travel pass. People on disability allowance are also concerned that if they take up a job and it does not work out they will have great difficulty getting their previous payment back. All these things are laid out very well in the report, which will be co-published by me, the Minister of State at the Department of Social Protection, Deputy Finian McGrath, and the Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris, in the coming weeks and I intend to publish it not just with its recommendations but with the policy responses to those recommendations. There are a lot of things that could make a real difference to people with disabilities and encourage them to take up work such as an assurance that, if it does not work out, they will not find themselves adrift.

I will have to come back to Members with more detailed costings on JobPath but I will certainly give any information I can. I gave the figure of €26.8 million for 2016 but it is not just about the costs. It is about the value and what it has achieved. People referred to JobPath are 20% more likely to get a job than the control group of similar people who are not so referred. That is particularly true of those at the greatest distance from the labour market, the very long-term unemployed who are 40% more likely to get a job than the same sort of person who is not referred to JobPath. As is the case with any service the Government provides, one has to consider the value as well as the cost. The results to date suggest it will be a very economically and financially advantageous programme.

If a client has mental health issues or a disability that prevents them from working they can be referred to the Department or can refer themselves to the Department for another payment, such as disability allowance or an illness payment. We are finding that as we work more intensively and engage one-to-one with many more people on jobseeker's allowance, we are finding more people who are on the wrong payment and should be on disability allowance or an illness benefit. People can be on jobseeker's allowance for a very long time and could have continued to receive it but when we made efforts to get them into work it became obvious that it was not the right payment for them. Part of the reason for the increase in disability allowance is the fact that people have migrated from jobseeker's as a result.

We are reducing the caseload of the local employment services, LES. Not too long ago they had caseloads of over 1,000 people per officer and I do not know how anyone could possibly do that. We are trying to get the ratio down to 1:150 and the LES will go back to what they did at the start, namely, work intensively with those who are furthest away from the labour market and need the most support. If I was a caseworker I would rather work with such a ratio and I do not know one could operate a service on the basis of a ratio of 1:1,000. Indecon is carrying out a full review of the LES and will report this year. The statistics show a great variation in performance in the LES. Some produce very good results but some do not and are pretty poor. The JobPath is based on payment by results, which is not the case with the LES, where the taxpayer has to pay even if they are unsuccessful in getting people back to work.

Senator Higgins said that JobPath could be scaled up very rapidly and she is correct. That is one of the advantages of having private contractors and those companies did that at a time of high unemployment, when there was a public sector recruitment barrier and it was needed. It can also be scaled down very quickly if we do not need it so much, or at all. When one takes people on as public servants it is much harder to flex up and flex down and there are pension issues, issues with buildings and so on. In this system, our own officials in our own Intreo buildings provide a core service that will always be needed while we use contractors such as JobPath to scale up or down, depending on how much additionality we need and how much unemployment there is. This is standard in the private sector where companies have their own staff and buildings for core services but can flex up and down as they need to according to demand. This also makes it easier to be adaptable so that if we want JobPath to do different things in the future we can do that.

I am not an expert on EU procurement law but I am told that the question is complicated and has a complicated answer so I will have to come back to Senator Higgins on it. Public or personal service delivery contracts are not excluded from the requirement to abide by EU public procurement rules but there is a higher threshold for the requirement to go to EU-wide tender.

There are a number of ways to exit JobPath. One exits automatically after a year, one can take up a job, one can sign off or one can apply for alternative payments, for example disability payments, back to education allowance or back to work enterprise allowance, for which a lot of people apply.

I have answered as many questions as I can and I have noted a few things on which I will follow up with Members in the form of correspondence.

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