Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent)
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1149. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if a review, as required under section 18(3) of the Social Welfare and Pensions Act 2014, has been conducted and laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas. [45868/18]

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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Section 18 of the Social Welfare and Pensions Act 2014 allows for the discrimination on the grounds of age in respect of a prescribed class of persons in the provision of employment services and supports. The provisions in Section 18 facilitate the implementation of the Youth Guarantee, which was agreed by the European Council on 22 April 2013 to tackle the challenge of youth joblessness.

When the EU Youth Guarantee Recommendation was adopted in 2013, Ireland already had in place many of the elements to meet the recommendation’s objective of ensuring that young people receive an offer of employment, education or training within four months of becoming unemployed. The implementation of the Irish Youth Guarantee focused on enhancing processes and policies for assisting young unemployed people to secure sustainable jobs.

JobsPlus provides subsidies to employers for the full-time employment of those formerly long-term unemployed on the Live Register. In February 2015 “JobsPlus Youth” was added to the scheme under the EU Youth Guarantee scheme. This addition was in line with recommendations from the OECD and meant that, the qualifying period for those aged under 25 was reduced from 12 months to four months. A focus Policy Assessment on JobsPlus was undertaken in 2017 and published in 2018 which reviewed the operation of the JobsPlus employment incentive scheme from the commencement of the scheme in July 2013 up until the end of 2016. Between 2014 and 2016 a total of 2,167 participants aged under 25 benefitted from JobsPlus. Between June 2013 and December 2016, the Live Register fell by 36% from 434,905 to 276,502 while at the same time unemployment among under 25s had also fallen by 57% from 71,202 to 30,285. This indicated that, in 2017 with an improving economy, deadweight on the scheme for under 25s may be increasing as more of this cohort would find work without the assistance of JobsPlus.

The Youth Employment Support Scheme (YESS) which was launched this year is also targeted at young jobseekers that face difficulty in entering the labour market or some form of work experience. A review will be undertaken on this initiative in due course.

For those who do not find employment, additional offers are provided for. Most such offers (over 70%) are in existing further education or training programmes. Others are in existing community-based employment programmes/workplace based interventions such as CE and Tús. Long-term unemployed jobseekers under-25 are also referred to JobPath, a contracted, payment-by-results employment services that provides additional resources and supports to the long-term unemployed.

The Action Plan for Jobs sets out Ireland’s policies in support of enterprise and employment growth. The most recent Pathways to Work strategy, for the period 2016-2020, continues to focus on addressing youth unemployment, building on reforms introduced in the Youth Guarantee Implementation Plan and by introducing new measures to ensure that the young unemployed take up a substantial share of the jobs being created by economic recovery.

Reflecting the impact of government policy, and the overall improvement in the labour market, youth unemployment continues to fall with a rate of 12% estimated by CSO in October 2018, down from a peak rate of almost 32% in 2012. The youth unemployment rate now lies significantly below the EU-28 average rate of 15.8%.Youth unemployment figures can be expected to fall further this year in line with the continuing forecast fall in overall unemployment.

These trends indicate that together with improvements in the labour market and economic recovery, our approach to youth employment, which focuses in the first instance on enhancing processes and policies for assisting young unemployed people to find and secure sustainable jobs, has been relatively successful.

The Pathways to Work Strategy commits to a rolling programme of process and programme evaluations of Pathways to Work reforms. Programme evaluations conducted to date can be accessed at:

www.welfare.ie/Pathways-to-work-research.

Each report outlines the probability of exit to employment at various stages post-programme completion. Furthermore, evaluations of JobPath and JobsPlus, including JobsPlus Youth, are currently underway and are expected to be finalised later this year. As with all schemes, my Department will continue to review the conditions and operations of the schemes to ensure they remain effective.