Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I cannot accept an amendment for something that already exists. The Senator is asking me to do something that already exists. I will read out the existing guidelines. They are guidelines for everybody who makes a personal progression plan. The Senator has a particular issue with some of the Department's contracted services but the guidelines are the same for everybody, whether they are Intreo case officers, the contracted services of Seetec and Turas Nua, or the contracted services of the Department's jobs clubs, the local employment service, LES, the Irish Local Development Network, ILDN, or partnership organisations. They all must do exactly the same thing.

The plan is a benign administrative document that is personal to the individual jobseeker who is looking for work. All that it includes is the person's contact information, the contact details for the person's personal adviser so that they both can access each other, the detail of the customer's skills, competencies and aptitudes, the fields of work that the person feels is appropriate to the jobseeker, the particular barriers to employment facing the jobseeker, the agreed actions that both of them will take to overcome those barriers, the jobseeker's employment goals as in where he or she would like to be at the end of the process or where he or she would like to be working, an agreed set of skills, training, education or development goals and actions to help him or her to get to being that person or onto a career path, and an agreed set of employment related experience interventions.If someone wanted to work in retail, he or she would take a specific training course to get relevant work experience. That is the kind of information in a personal progression plan. It is organic. It is a supporting document, which is supposed to be shared between two people - one who is looking for work and the other who is helping that person to fulfil his or her ambition. It is as benign as that. Any matters in a personal progression plan are there only to assist the person to achieve his or her own goals. There is no requirement to supply data in respect of family members or cohabitants. It is none of our business. This does not preclude a contracted person or adviser from exploring potential barriers to employment that may encompass people's personal family circumstances. That information needs to be volunteered. If it is not volunteered, we cannot extract it from people. A personal adviser may often offer advice with regard to childcare, family flexible employment options or whatever it takes to get the person who is sitting in front of us, looking for work and asking for the State's help, to access the best options. That is true whether it is a person in Navan local employment services, in Meath Seetec, or somebody who has come through an Intreo case office or my Navan office. The progression plan is exactly the same regardless of who is delivering and signing it.

Contracted public employment services are fully compliant with data protection law and the new GDPR legislation that was passed by both Houses last year. Anybody who wants a hard copy of his or her personal progression plan is entitled to ask for and receive it. Nobody stands over a person to make him or her sign something that he or she does not subscribe to. If a person does not subscribe to it, he or she should not sign it and instead get it into a state where they will subscribe to it. This is a person's journey for the year that he or she is with the case officer, to ensure that he or she gets back to full-time employment. Those are the guidelines that currently exist. I would not change them in any way by having a report.