Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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1769. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection her views on the Central Bank’s new metric, the non-employment index, and the finding that 888,708 persons of working age between 15 to 64 fall into this non-employed category. [38305/17]

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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The employment rate for people aged 15-64 is just over 65%. This means that, according to the Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) for Q1 2017 published by the Central Statistics Office in May, there are about 1.05 million people in this age group who are not working. As the employment rate has improved from a low of 59% in early 2011, the number of non-working people in this age group has fallen by about 230,000 from its then level of 1.27 million.

The non-working group published in the QNHS includes, as well as the unemployed, other categories such as students, full-time carers, people who are unable to work due to disability, and people who may have retired early.

I understand that these existing QNHS categories, combined with past QNHS data on transitions to employment from each of the various categories, have now been used by the Central Bank to produce a “non-employment index” – a weighted average of the estimated trend in potential availability for work among people in each category. The index for the most recent quarter is given as 7.9% of the relevant population – suggesting that the availability of potential workers aged 15 to 65 available to enter employment in the near term is of the order of 240,000 – i.e. somewhat greater than the figure of 150,000 unemployed in that quarter, but less than a quarter of the 1.05 million people in the same age group who are not working.

It has always been clear that jobs, when created, are taken up not just by the unemployed but also by other groups outside the labour force – particularly new entrants from education and people returning to the workforce after a period when they were engaged, for example, in full-time caring. The work by the Central Bank is a useful attempt to quantify the scale of this labour availability based on historic data on take-up of employment by these groups.

As unemployment falls, government policies under the Pathways to Work strategy are increasingly focused on supporting active labour market participation by people currently outside the workforce – particularly carers and those with disabilities.