Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 17 October 2013
33. Deputy Barry Cowen asked the Minister for Social Protection the total amount of funding allocated from the European Union for the Youth Guarantee scheme here; whether it is adequate in her view; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [43347/13]
View answerAs part of the European Council agreement on the 2014 – 2020 EU Budget earlier this year, it was decided, in association with the agreement on the Youth Guarantee, to provide €6 billion for a new Youth Employment Initiative (YEI) for regions with particularly high levels of youth unemployment. €3 billion of this is to be earmarked from existing resources within the European Social Fund, and €3 billion from a new fund. It was also decided that payments of the Youth Employment Initiative will be front-loaded and all monies provided for this purpose will be allocated to measures undertaken in 2014 and 2015.
The exact allocation of this funding between countries is yet to be determined. The Department of Social Protection is leading an inter-departmental group to develop an implementation plan for Ireland and we expect to submit this plan to the EU commission before the end of this year.
For Ireland this plan will likely require that we:
- Earmark a quota of additional places/opportunities for young people on existing schemes.
- Vary the eligibility conditions for access to certain schemes by young people - for example reduce the eligibility criteria so that young people can access places/opportunities after 4 – 6 months of unemployment rather than the general requirement of 12 months unemployment.
- Expand the range of opportunities currently on offer to young people in the form of further education and training, internships, subsidised private-sector recruitment, and supports for self-employment.
At present we spend c €170m per annum on employment, training and further education programmes for young people. The type of actions set out above will inevitably involve some increase in the level of expenditure on programme take-up by young people.
As an initial step towards preparing for implementation of the guarantee, provision was made in this week’s 2014 Budget for:
- reducing the threshold (in terms of duration of unemployment) for JobsPlus eligibility from 12 months – to 6 months or less – in the case of persons aged less than 25 years,
- an additional intake of 1,500 young people on to the very successful JobBridge scheme,
- ensuring that 1,000 places on the Tús scheme are targeted at young people,
- developing a pilot programme to support young unemployed people to take up opportunities under schemes such as Your First EURES Job,
- ring-fencing a minimum of 2,000 training places for under-25s by the Department of Education and Skills, under a follow-up to the successful Momentum programme that operated in 2013, with income support for participants being provided by my department,
- the Department of Jobs Enterprise and Innovation making funds available to young entrepreneurs via Micro finance Ireland and other business start-up schemes.
In total, the provision across these headings in the 2014 Budget comes to about €46 million.
Given the scale of existing and future provision it is clear that the bulk of funding for labour market programmes for young people will continue to come from domestic exchequer sources. We will however endeavour to maximise Ireland’s share of the additional funding available from the EU.
