Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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117. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the way he intends to monitor the number of jobs created by his initiatives to ensure that the number created matches those expected such as the microenterprise loans scheme. [18608/13]

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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The role of Government is to create the environment in which enterprises can start-up grow and create jobs. The Government’s key policy instrument to achieve this is the Action Plan for Jobs. The 2013 Action Plan for Jobs was launched on 22nd February. The Plan contains 333 individual actions, broken down further into Quarterly deliverables. My Department and its agencies are responsible for delivering approximately 190 or 57% of the actions.

As was the case last year, the delivery of the Action Plan for Jobs will be overseen by a Monitoring Committee co-chaired by the Secretary General of my Department and the Secretary General to the Government. Quarterly Progress Reports will be published on the achievement of the deliverables and this will include the job creation figures where applicable. In addition, I regularly meet with the Chief Executive Officers of the Enterprise Development Agencies to discuss, inter alia, progress towards a range of targets, including jobs targets.

In relation to the microfinance loan fund, Microfinance Ireland the company which administers the scheme, provides my Department with quarterly reports and has just compiled its report for the first 6 months (1 October 2012 - 31 March 2013). I can report that to end March, the scheme has supported 116 jobs in 44 microenterprises.

I would emphasise that the transformation needed to grow jobs in our economy will be through deliberate and determined action across all areas of Government and the private sector. One year into the Action Plan for Jobs process, we can see the evidence that the strategy and architecture are working. Over 90% of the 270 individual commitments in last year’s action plan were completed during 2012, we are climbing back up the international competitiveness tables, our exports are at record high levels and IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland had their best jobs growth figures in 2012 many years. Overall, the level of private sector employment is stabilising, as evidenced in the most recent Quarterly National Household Survey figures for Q4 2012 which showed the first annual increase in employment since the second quarter of 2008.