Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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47. To ask the Minister for Social Protection to put incentives in place to reduce youth and long-term unemployment; if schemes require upgrading; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11839/16]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The Government’s primary strategy to tackle both youth and long-term unemployment is through policies to create the environment for a strong economic recovery by promoting competitiveness and productivity. Reflecting the impact of government policy, and the overall improvement in the labour market, youth unemployment continues to fall with a rate of 18.0% in April 2016 (as estimated by CSO), compared to 21.0% in April 2015 and a peak of over 31% in 2012. The long-term unemployment rate peaked at 9.5% in Q1 2012 before falling to 4.7% in Q4 2015. At the latter date, the long-term unemployed accounted for 54.5% of all those unemployed, down from almost 61% in early 2012. Although the labour market situation is improving considerably as the recovery continues, the Government recognises the importance of a continued focus on measures to facilitate the young unemployed and long-term unemployed back into work. This is the rationale behind the Government’s Pathways to Work 2016-2020 strategy (published January 2016) and the Youth Guarantee plan (published January 2014).

As under services such as Intreo, Youthreach, VTOS, PLC programmes, and JobBridge, Ireland already had many of the recommended component parts of a Youth Guarantee as envisaged in the relevant EU Recommendation, the main approach in Ireland is to prioritise access to these existing supports for young people, who become unemployed. The objective is to ensure that they have an opportunity for employment, further education or work experience within the recommended period of four months as per the EU council recommendation.

The key objective is to help newly unemployed young people find and secure sustainable jobs. In this regard there is monthly engagement with young people by case officers to assist young people to prepare, review and, if appropriate, revise personal progression plans. As part of this process additional supports may be provided, both through existing schemes and through youth-specific measures. Most such offers (over 70%) are in existing further education or training programmes. Others are in existing community-based employment programmes such as CE, Gateway and Tús. Overall, over 19,100 opportunities were taken up on the relevant programmes in 2015.

Pathways to Work 2016-2020 continues to prioritise these measures for the young unemployed and additionally commits to: increasing the share of workplace-based interventions for youth unemployed; ensuring that monthly engagement, at a minimum, is consistently applied and maintained; restructuring the First Steps programme; and implementing the Defence Forces Skills for Life programme.

A range of measures were introduced under previous Pathways to Work strategies for the long-term unemployed. This included a structured process of engagement with long-term unemployed people being referred to the activation process (Group Engagement followed by regular one-to-one case officer contact); wage subsidies in JobsPlus; the roll-out of a payment-by-results contracted employment services in JobPath, to provide additional capacity in order to engage more systematically with long-term unemployed jobseekers; and reserved places for the long-term unemployed on a range of Further Education and Training (FET) and public employment programmes.A core focus of Pathways to Work 2016-2020 is on consolidating and improving the quality and consistency of reforms undertaken in previous strategies, with continued prioritisation of those long-term unemployed. I am satisfied these measures will help to address youth and long-term unemployment.

Finally, a rolling programme of evaluations has been implemented under Pathways to Work 2015 together with regular jobseeker customer satisfaction surveys. Evaluations of JobBridge, of Intreo process reforms and of BTWEA are currently being conducted. Other programmes and processes will be evaluated throughout the period of the current Pathways to Work. Any changes to schemes will be considered in the light of the findings of these evaluations.