Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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879. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if she will consider amending the eligibility criteria for participants in community employment schemes (details supplied); and if she will consider expanding the eligibility criteria, for example, the possibility of making Ukrainian immigrants eligible to participate in CE schemes and allowing people in receipt of jobseeker's for less than 12 months. [1091/23]

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.  The programme aims to improve a person’s opportunities to return to employment.

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 jobseekers 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. 

As the Deputy is aware, under the EU Temporary Protection Directive, all persons fleeing the war in Ukraine have been granted the rights of EU citizens, including the right to access income supports, employment supports and the right to work in this country on the same basis as EU citizens. The Department first started providing assistance to those fleeing Ukraine in late February 2022.  As 2023 progresses those who have been in receipt of a qualifying payment for 12 months will become eligible to apply for CE.

We need to ensure that employment support programmes such as CE, which were designed to assist those furthest from the labour market, continue to be available for those who would benefit most from these programmes.  For CE, this continues to be those who have been out of work for a year.  

Eligibility criteria for CE, continues to be kept under active review by my Department officials to ensure the best outcomes for individual participants, to support the vital community services delivered by schemes and to take account of changes to the labour market.

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.

I trust this clarifies matters for the Deputy.