I propose to take Questions Nos. 71 and 72 together.
My Department monitors national redundancies on both a company and sectoral basis to ascertain whether a sustainable case for EGF co-financing assistance may be made for affected workers in a number of ways. The primary EGF related redundancy monitoring system used by the Department is the statutory notification procedure under Protection of Employment legislation. This requires the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to be notified by employers of certain proposed collective redundancies. In addition, my officials maintain contact with relevant Government Departments, in the case of banking sector redundancies, the Department of Finance, as well as monitoring media and other information sources for early warning of proposed redundancies.
Certain large-scale redundancies in the banking sector in particular were the subject of media speculation and various announcements in recent years. Taken as a whole hundreds, if not thousands, of redundancies were in view over a period of one, two or three years in this sector. The level of redundancies in the banking sector was tracked by the Department particularly during 2010 and 2011 in an effort to establish whether a sustainable EGF sectoral application could be made. Data on collective redundancies is collected and collated on an ongoing basis with a view to establishing, inter alia, whether the prescribed four or nine months reference periods under the EGF Regulations can be met within which the required minimum number of 500 redundancies must occur. As such the monitoring undertaken is continuous rather than annualised and data is not readily available in the format sought by the Deputy.
There were certain points in the 2010 to 2011 period when it appeared numerically, based mainly on announcements of proposed announcements, that the numbers of redundancies did meet the minimum EGF threshold of 500. However, there still remained the other relevant qualifying criteria to be met. It should be recalled that certain collective redundancy notifications cited significant redundancy time periods that went well beyond the nine months reference period required under EGF Regulations and without sufficient detail to ascertain the precise timing of redundancies, or indicated no set timescale, or no formal redundancy rationale. Nor do actual redundancies always equate to the numbers of proposed redundancies cited in the final analysis. The Department sought to maximise the scale of any potential sectoral EGF application through optimal timing of an application and consulted with the Department of Finance as to proposed future restructuring and related redundancies in the sector, which indications were would be on a very significant scale of thousands of workers. This was estimated to be likely in the latter half of 2011 and into 2012, when very significant redundancies were being signalled to take place.
In late 2011 when the significant redundancy announcements which were anticipated being made did not occur, further detailed examination, including the collation of data from the Department of Finance and the Department of Social Protection, was undertaken by the Department. This exercise was also undertaken in the context of uncertainty over the continuance of the so called EGF "crisis derogation" after 31 December 2011 and which heretofore allowed redundancies to be based on direct linkage to the global economic and financial crisis,. However, upon examination at that time the 500 threshold figure in verified actual redundancy terms within the nine-months reference period required by and agreed with the European Commission for submission of applications, was not met.