Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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391. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if she intends to issue a further extension beyond March 2023 to participants of the community employment scheme, particularly in rural areas where current recruitment can be difficult. [2850/23]

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. The programme aims to improve participants' opportunities to return to work in the open labour market.

As the economy and society emerged from COVID, it was clear that some schemes were encountering difficulties maintaining services, as participants with COVID related extended contracts started to leave schemes from April 2022. This led to an increased turnover of participants which could have had an impact on services provided by schemes. As a consequence, Minister Humphreys and I introduced a number of reforms to CE, to minimise the impact on schemes and services they provide.

One of the changes introduced granted CE sponsors some flexibility to extend individual placements and to retain existing participants in cases where no replacement is immediately available. It is expected that a number of these extensions will be coming to an end in the coming months.

In order to combat existing and upcoming vacancies on CE, 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.

However, if the Deputy is aware of a specific problematic case, the sponsor can be advised to contact the local Community Development Officer with responsibility for their scheme, who will assist them with this process.

It remains important that CE places are available for persons who are long term unemployed to assist them return to employment in the labour market. Therefore, extensions are only approved in specific circumstances where an extension will not prevent an incoming long term unemployed person the opportunity to take up a CE place.

I trust this clarifies the position for the Deputy.

Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael)
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392. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if a person (details supplied) can take up a community employment scheme if they are six months away from eligibility and there is nobody else to take up the post; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [2959/23]

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 long-term unemployed people by providing work experience and training opportunities within their local communities on a temporary fixed term basis. The programme aims to improve a person’s opportunities to return to employment.

I am very conscious of the important role that CE schemes play in providing valuable occupational experience and training as a stepping-stone to employment for people who are long term unemployed. Schemes 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.

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 and so it is not possible to facilitate people who have only been on the Live Register for shorter periods of time. There are a range of other employment supports available to short term unemployed persons and I would advise this person in question to contact their local Intreo Office to avail of these supports.

Eligibility criteria for CE continue 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.

I trust this clarifies matters for the Deputy.