Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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847. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the status of the pay claim by CE supervisors; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [63318/22]

Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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Firstly, I wish to acknowledge the valuable and dedicated service that CE supervisors/assistant supervisors provide in running CE schemes in delivering local based community services while providing a valuable training and development opportunity to the long-term unemployed and to those often furthest removed from the labour market.

The Department, as the funder of CE schemes, received correspondence last year from Fórsa and SIPTU seeking a pay increase for CE supervisors and assistant supervisors.  Fórsa and SIPTU have since referred a pay claim to the conciliation service of the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).  The WRC issued an invite to the Department to take part in a conciliation process in December last year. As a follow up the Department brought a memo to Government indicating its intention to attend the WRC conciliation in its role as funder of these schemes and has now advised the WRC of this.  In responding to the WRC, the Department stated that officials will be made available for the conciliation meeting at an early date and with short notice.

Any increase in pay rates that would potentially increase the overall cost to the state of funding schemes, or state funded activities in the wider community and voluntary sector, must take into consideration the potential cost to the exchequer.  Given these budgetary implications, and the referral of other similar claims to the WRC, the Department will continue to engage with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and consult with it on the likely terms of any settlement that may be reached as talks at the WRC progress. Any outcome from these discussions will need to be agreed by Government.

Minister Humphreys and I are fully committed to the future of CE and will continue to support and improve CE for the benefit of the supervisors and participants, given the valuable contribution being made to local communities through the provision of services.  

 I trust this clarifies the matter.

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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848. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if she will provide an update on the community employment scheme; if there are plans to reform the CE schemes; if there is a strategy to combat recruitment challenges into the projects; if there is a cost breakdown of each of the projects; the number of persons currently availing of the scheme; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [63319/22]

Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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The aim of the Community Employment (CE) programme is to enhance the employability of disadvantaged and long-term unemployed people by providing work experience and training opportunities for them within their local communities on a temporary fixed term basis. 

We are all very conscious of the important role that CE plays 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 also falls.  This creates an obvious challenge.

Having said that, it is not an insurmountable challenge, and working together with CE sponsors we can, and have, devised changes that will help the schemes to continue to support their local communities. Minister Humphreys and I have announced a number of reforms and enhancements to CE over the past year.  

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. A new pilot scheme to extend CE eligibility to people who are Qualified Adults on a jobseeker claim will be rolled out in the coming weeks: these customers are generally unemployed partners of people in receipt of a weekly jobseeker payment. 

The candidate referral process for CE has been reviewed and changed.  Schemes have been given new flexibility to allow them to directly recruit eligible candidates to fill 30% of places, but are also 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 have also been granted some flexibility to extend individual placements and to retain existing participants in cases where no replacement is immediately available. 

There is no plan to reform CE schemes, however as outlined above, the eligibility criteria for CE, the duration for participation on CE and the referral process for CE continue to be kept under active review by my Department. Both Minister Humphreys and I are very conscious of the need to support CE and we continue to meet regularly with representatives of the programme. 

CE sponsor organisations receive annual contracts from my Department. Grant funding to each scheme varies, depending on the number of participants and the range of activities undertaken with a wide range of payments paid to each scheme. As there are 837 CE schemes nationally, it is not possible to provide a cost breakdown for each project in this reply, however the table below gives an overview of the total paid in respect of CE per county in 2022.

There are currently 18,632 participants and 1,225 supervisors on CE. The budget for the CE programme in 2023 is circa €367 million. 

I trust this clarifies the position for the Deputy.  

Table 1- Overview of the total paid per county in 2022