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

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.

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

As a result of the continued 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 participation on CE also falls. This creates an obvious challenge in terms of recruitment.

Minister Humphreys and I have announced a number of reforms and enhancements to CE since December 2021 to address this challenge, including a provision to allow CE participants who reach 60 years of age to remain until they reach state pension age, updating the baseline year for CE which opens the scheme to a cohort of people who had previously exceeded their time on CE, introducing flexibilities to the CE candidate referral process to allow direct recruitment to fill 30% of places subject to conditions to ensure that places do not go unfilled when there are candidates available from the Live Register. CE sponsors have also been granted flexibility to extend individual placements and to retain existing participants in cases where no replacement is immediately available

More recently, the CE general eligibility of 12 months on the live register has been reduced to 9 months for those fleeing the war in Ukraine and a new pilot scheme to extend CE eligibility to people who are Qualified Adults on a jobseeker claim has commenced: these customers are generally unemployed partners of people in receipt of a weekly jobseeker payment.

The organisation concerned has 32 active participants and 2 supervisors currently, my officials locally are actively working to try and source candidates for their current vacancies and as the implementation of the most recent changes take effect it will enable these officials to identify a wider range of eligible candidates for CE in their locality to address their current vacancies.

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.

I trust this clarifies matters for the Deputy.