Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 24 January 2023
391. Deputy Pádraig O'Sullivan asked the Minister for 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]
View answerThe 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.
