Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 6 July 2023
104. Deputy Sean Sherlock asked the Minister for Social Protection if she will examine a proposal to allow pre-retirement men coming from a manual labour background to have a disregard for the requirement for 12 months in receipt of a social protection payment so they can qualify for community employment schemes. [32063/23]
View answerI wish to ask the Minister for Social Protection if she will examine a proposal to allow men and women, the question should have read men and women, of pre-retirement age coming from a manual labour background to have a disregard for the requirement to be in receipt of a social protection payment for 12 months, in order that they can qualify for community employment schemes.
I thank the Deputy for his question. The aim of community employment is to enhance the employability of disadvantaged and unemployed persons by providing work experience and training opportunities for them within their communities. In addition, it helps long-term unemployed people to re-enter the active workforce by breaking their experience of unemployment through a return to work routine. The general rule relating to eligibility for participation in community employment, CE, is that the person must be in receipt of a qualifying payment for 12 months or more. This is to ensure that the scheme is targeted at those furthest removed from the labour market and who will benefit most from participation. The exceptions to the eligibility criteria apply to those who would be considered among the most vulnerable in society, and include people from the Traveller or Roma communities, people with addiction issues or who have been recently released from prison.
Recently, participation in CE was extended to include the adult dependants of people in receipt of jobseeker’s allowance as an initiative to assist them to return to the workforce. Currently, access to CE does not include retired manual labourers unless they satisfy the current eligibility criteria. There are no plans at present to change the 12-month eligibility rule in respect of pre-retired manual workers. However, the eligibility criteria for CE continues to be kept under active review by my Department to ensure the best outcomes for individual participants, to support the vital community services and to take account of changes to the labour market.
While I appreciate the answer, it is that the status quo remains. That is what I interpret from the Minister of State's response. What we are talking about here are people who either carried the hod, or were cleaners who partook in manual labour for long periods of their lives where the physical nature of their work is such that they cannot transition at a certain period of their lives into new modes or forms of employment. Frankly, the community employment scheme has delivered untold benefits to our communities. However, there is a category of people who want to continue to engage in what I would call caretaking, light duties, groundskeeping, gardening and so on, categories of work like that where we do not farm them out. If the Minister of State could look at the criteria in such a way as to make it easier for people to continue on in the workplace, albeit in a staged-back and less intensive way, there would be thousands of people who would love to qualify for such schemes and who would make an active and decent contribution to society and to their communities. Could the Minister of State review the schemes, criteria and eligibility by which they operate because we have to recognise there is a category of people here who just will not be able to continue on?
I thank the Deputy. We have to be careful if we are going to categorise a whole group of people as likely not able or eligible to go back into the mainstream workforce. We would have to be very careful if we were to do that, notwithstanding that there will be some cases, no doubt the Deputy has seen some himself, where that would be very difficult for an individual. A key strand of the Pathways to Work strategy, strand 5, is on working for all and leaving no one behind. This strand includes a focus on older workers and returners. It specifically includes a commitment to deliver dedicated recruitment events for older workers and returners to help them engage with employers and to encourage their recruitment. We have had a number of events in that regard. Last year, we had 25 in-person events under the return to work campaign with almost 2,000 people engaged in that. A really important statistic regarding people over 50 in particular is that, over the last 12 months up to the end of May, 18,000 people aged over 50 left the live register specifically for employment. I can see individual cases but we have to look at overall groups in terms of shaping a policy for CE.
I take the Minister of State's point and I am not trying to apply a broad stroke to this but I think it would be acknowledged that there is a category of workers where the ability to transition to enhancing their digital skills, for instance, would be limited. That is a fact of life. That is a non-judgmental statement I am making. There are unfilled places in community employment schemes. There are people who carried the hod, as I say, whose backs were broken. These are people such as cleaners who had intensive manual labour type jobs who do not fulfil the disability or illness criteria but they are still able to make a contribution and they just want to transition into some form of community-based activity and to be recognised and to receive a payment for that. All I am asking here is that even though the Minister of State says it is being kept under review, we move it beyond being kept under review to maybe a more active policy to engage with that category of workers.
The Deputy will be aware that, particularly over the last 18 months, that we have been highly responsive and adaptive to the needs of organisations who depend on CE and to the reality of the labour market itself. We have adapted and changed the eligibility for CE a number of times. We would like to see a little bit more evidence in terms of the definability and scale of the group as well but it is important to say that when Intreo officers across country sit down with someone, they develop a personal progression plan that is tailored to that individual. There are good supports available there in trying to find mainstream work for those people. There is a training grant of €1,000, and qualifications such as Safe Pass that might be of interest to the group we are talking about can be covered. We will keep the Deputy's point under consideration and, as I have said, we have adapted and changed it over time.
The Minister of State will put my file into a filing cabinet somewhere in the Department.
No, I take the Deputy's point but we are talking about potentially changing the eligibility for a whole scheme, where there are 18,000 people involved as well. We have to take policy changes with due consideration.
