Last week I dealt mainly with taxation and what I perceived as the need for tax reform. I should like now to turn to an issue which is equally important, particularly in view of the report published today on the need for more careful planning of resources in the State sector. I should like to talk about manpower policy which has become what we might call a large industry. The State is expending about £200 million on various training and employment schemes. Yet we have no coherent set of manpower policies drawn up by any Government. The last policy statement made about manpower policy was back in the sixties. The employment climate in the sixties was entirely different from the one we face today. If we look at the rationale behind the National Manpower Service we see that it had a very different task from the task today. The service was seen mainly as a way of easing the time lag between employers identifying potential employees and employment. It was not envisaged that it would have to cope with the huge unemployment problem we now face.
Apart from the change in the economic circumstances, over the years successive Governments have responded to growing unemployment by adding piecemeal changes to the policies adopted by Governments. I can cite very many worthwhile schemes, including the work experience programme, the Youth Employment Agency and the recent enterprise allowance scheme. It must be said that they were introduced individually and without taking a global view of what they were intended to achieve. A recent OECD report on manpower policy in Ireland drew attention to the fact that many of the agencies charged with implementing these schemes are doing so with less than full commitment. In effect, they have not seen these schemes as their primary responsibility and, therefore, the operation of these schemes, many of them worth while, has suffered. This points to the need for the Government to reassess what has been achieved by these programmes, who is doing what, and whether we are getting proper results.
Another obvious problem which has emerged in the manpower area is the extensive overlap. One area which I am glad to see being tackled is the overlap between AnCO and many of the VECs and other educational institutes. Other areas are not being tackled — for example, the duplication of assessments in Manpower and AnCO when they are addressing the task of finding what opportunities should be offered to young people. It is quite common that young people apply to Manpower for a basic assessment and interview and, at the same time, apply to AnCO for a basic assessment and interview. That duplication is wasting public money and creates the more important danger from a young person's point of view that there is a strong temptation for AnCO to go for a creaming process which takes the very best possible applicant, rather than the people the State would like to see being given training opportunities. It is important that the State should intervene and indicate its idea of where policy should be heading.
The fundamental task for the Department of Labour is to play a much more authoritative role in deciding who does what and how it is carried out. I am concerned that the Acts which established the various independent agencies in the manpower area gave them terms of reference which were too broad and were in conflict with those of other agencies. Naturally that has led to conflicts. The Minister for Labour has lacked effective control over the operations of bodies such as AnCO. In the past year, we have seen evidence of where AnCO have expanded into areas and, at the end of the day, serious concern was expressed by the public. There had to be some checking on their activities. There should be a clear policy context within which the various agencies operate and that type of misunderstanding should not occur.
The role of the Youth Employment Agency needs clarification. They were designed to co-ordinate the activities of AnCO, Manpower, the Department of Education, the Department of the Environment and many other agencies dealing with employment and training problems. They were not given effective policy authority to enable them to cajole or push those agencies. It is fair to say that they should not have such authority because that authority should rest with the Minister.
The Youth Employment Agency need to be given more effective power of co-ordination by allowing them to sub-contract to the different agencies the funds they provide. At present their control is on a rather arbitrary basis. They get the youth employment levy and they are more or less obliged to subscribe to whatever programmes are being operated by the different agencies which apply to persons under the age of 25 years.
If the Youth Employment Agency are to be effective in co-ordinating policy, they should hold the purse strings more firmly than that. I envisage a sub-contracting arrangement whereby the agency were actually stating what they required from AnCO or any other body who were spending their funds.
A number of detailed points also must be tackled by what I would look for, a White Paper on manpower policy. The first of these detailed points is that a clear distinction must be made between training for economic development and training and opportunities for disadvantaged groups in the labour force. Obviously these are very different in the sort of person they deal with; therefore access to those courses is very different in regard to how people should be assessed for qualification for such courses. Equally, the content of the courses differs very much and the tests of success in these areas are very different. It is unrealistic to expect AnCO, a body interested primarily in economic development and training for economic development, to be able to give the sort of priority needed in training for disadvantaged groups. Although I am full of praise for their activity to date, I could not but be a little concerned when the OECD report indicated that they thought this sort of activity was not being given AnCO's wholehearted interest. Therefore, an important distinction must be made there in policy terms by the Minister for Labour.
The other aspect that must be tackled, a detail arising from that distinction, is that we have an enormous training programme now being carried out by AnCO, but there is very little independent monitoring of what is going on. In particular, no certification of standards is reached by training courses carried out by AnCO. That is important, because without certification confusion is likely to exist in the mind of the employer about exactly what has been the training and what people who have completed courses are able to do. In time the standard of the training will suffer and the advantages that a person who has been trained by AnCO has, will suffer if there is not clear certification of the content of the courses to make sure that high quality is being maintained. That certification must be done by an agency outside AnCO, as it would be done in any other higher education area. Equally, it is important that AnCO do not judge success entirely as being identical with a high placement rate from their courses. A high placement rate could indicate that AnCO are substituting the sort of task that employers should take on themselves.
