Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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The Department of Social Protection operates a number of employment support schemes for long term unemployed persons which also assist communities across the country in the provision of vital services. Currently, there are some 24,000 participants on the two schemes supporting long term unemployed persons back to work: Community Employment and Tús.

We are all very conscious of the important role that CE and Tús play and we all wish to support them as best we can. In addition to providing valuable occupational experience and training as a stepping-stone to employment for people who are unemployed, schemes such as CE and Tús also provide important and, in many cases essential, services to their local communities.

Thankfully, given the strong labour market performance the number of unemployed people dependent on social welfare payments continues to fall. While this is very welcome it also means that the number of candidates available for CE and Tús also falls. This creates an obvious challenge.

Having said that, it is not an insurmountable challenge, and working together with CE sponsors and Tús implementing bodies we can, and have, devised changes that will help the schemes to continue to support their local communities.

For example, following engagement with CE sponsors and Tús implementing bodies Minister Humphreys and I have announced a number of reforms and enhancements to CE and Tús since last December.

These changes included a provision to allow CE participants who reach 60 years of age to remain on CE until they reach state pension age. We also updated the baseline year for CE which opens the scheme to a cohort of people who had previously participated in the scheme. Extensions have also been granted to participants where the Department has not been in a position to provide new referrals to fill vacancies. Eligibility for Tús has been extended to persons in receipt of Disability Payments on a self-referral basis.

More recently as part of Budget 2023 we announced an increase of €5 per week or just over 22% in the weekly CE and Tús allowance. This increase is in addition to the increase in the core social welfare payments of €12 per week, meaning the minimum payment on CE and Tús will amount to €247.50 per week. This is the lowest rate of payment and people with children or other dependents receive additional payments, which are also increasing as part of our budget measures. For example, a person with an adult partner and one child aged over 12 will receive €443.50 per week, equivalent to about €23 per hour. These are attractive rates of payment and will help to encourage participation on the schemes.

We also changed the candidate referral process for CE. Schemes have been given new flexibility to allow them to directly recruit eligible candidates to fill 30% of places but are also a mandated to accept and place at least 60% of people referred by Intreo. This is to ensure that places do not go unfilled when there are candidates available from the Live Register. CE sponsors and Tús implementing bodies have also been granted some flexibility to extend individual placements and to retain existing participants in cases where no replacement is immediately available. Plans are also at an advanced stage for a new pilot scheme to extend CE eligibility to people who are Qualified Adults on a jobseeker claim; these are generally unemployed partners of people in receipt of a payment in their own right. This will open the scheme up to approximately 30,000 additional people. I expect this pilot to start early in 2023.

As I've already said, both Minister Humphreys and I are very conscious of the need to support CE and Tús and we continue to meet regularly with representatives of these programmes. The changes and improvements I've just described are a direct result of these engagements and I expect that they will play a significant role in supporting the schemes in the months ahead.

I trust this clarifies the position for the Deputy.