Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The Department of Social Protection provides activation support programmes for long-term unemployed jobseekers and those most distant from the labour market. The aim of the CE and Tús programmes are to enhance the employability of disadvantaged and long term unemployed people by providing work experience and training opportunities within their communities.

In addition, RSS is an income support initiative providing part-time employment opportunities for farmers or fishermen in receipt of certain social welfare payments, and underemployed in their primary occupation, within their local area in community and voluntary organisations.

In order to further assist all three schemes in the current tight labour market and as COVID emergency supports are phased out, Minister Humphreys and I recently announced a number of measures to CE, Tús and RSS. These will improve recruitment, remove the six year time limit on RSS for all participants, while continuing the practice whereby placements can be extended until suitable replacements are available to fill vacancies. These reforms will ensure that schemes can maintain services to local communities, all RSS participants can remain on the scheme until they reach State pension age and will improve access to schemes.

Government made a commitment in the Programme for Government and in the Rural Development Policy 2021-2025 to review the means assessment disregards for the Farm Assist. As part of this review process, it was recommended to provide for an extensive expansion to the list of Agri-Environmental schemes which qualifies towards income disregards. These measures have now been implemented from June 2022. While it is not possible to quantify the number of people who may benefit from these changes, it is hoped that they will have an added benefit of increasing the number of people who could potentially apply for the RSS scheme, through being in receipt of Farm Assist.

It will take some time to measure the impact of this change and the increased number of potential RSS participants. It should be noted that RSS Implementing Bodies (IBs) are encouraged by the Department to promote and publicise the RSS, to increase public awareness of the scheme and encourage take-up and participation in their area. I would strongly encourage persons interested in participating on the scheme to contact their local IB to take up these available places.

The Department is fully committed to the future of employment support programmes and will continue to support and improve them for the benefit of the supervisors, team leaders and participants, given the valuable contribution being made to local communities through the provision of services.

I trust this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.