Brendan Griffin (Kerry South, Fine Gael)
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35. To ask the Minister for Social Protection if she will explore the viability and potential benefits of increasing the top up payment paid to JobBridge interns; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [43408/13]

Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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43. To ask the Minister for Social Protection if her attention has been drawn to the motion passed by ICTU which concludes that JobBridge depresses genuine job creation and exerts downward pressure on wage levels; and her response to these conclusions. [43368/13]

Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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47. To ask the Minister for Social Protection her views on whether companies who can afford to create a new position of employment are choosing instead to take nine months labour for free at her Department's expense via the jobbridge scheme; and if she will make reforms to the scheme to mitigate the negative impact it has on job creation. [43369/13]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 35, 43 and 47 together.

The primary purpose of JobBridge is to provide unemployed people with an access route to employment which may otherwise be denied to them, on account of experience, qualifications or other grounds, in a very competitive labour market. JobBridge provides an opportunity to people, who have been unemployed for a period of time, to prove themselves to prospective employers and acquire real workplace experience to enhance their CVs.

As always with such schemes there will be some deadweight and displacement effects and the Department is acutely aware of the need to minimise these impacts. Accordingly, it incorporated a number of conditions into the scheme to minimise any such impacts including; placing a cap on the total number of interns that can be hired by any one organisation; placing limits on the duration of internships; including a cooling off period so that organisations cannot hire interns one after the other in sequence; requiring organisations to appoint a mentor to each intern, to complete a standard agreement for each intern and to provide an undertaking that the internship is not being used to displace employees. In addition host organisations are not permitted to advertise internships in areas where they have recently made redundancies or in areas where they currently have paid posts advertised. Host organisations must also complete and submit a monthly compliance report to the Department. The Department provides an on-line facility for interns or others to report breaches of these conditions.

The Department takes a serious view of any allegations that these scheme conditions/requirements are being breached and as part of its control process conducts random on-site inspection visits. The Department has conducted over 3,400 such monitoring visits to-date of which c 98% have been of a satisfactory nature. Remedial action is taken in all cases of non-compliance. The Department also engaged a firm of expert economic consultants to conduct an independent evaluation of the operation and effectiveness of the scheme, including an assessment of its displacement impacts. Overall the evaluation, by Indecon, estimated the level of displacement (between 3% and 6%) to be negligible relative to the positive progression outcomes for interns (Over 61% of interns progress into employment). I am not at this time planning to increase the top-up payment paid to interns.