Oireachtas Briefing - Community Employment - December 1998

Oireachtas Briefing on the Community Employment Scheme.

Summary

With 41,000 places, Community Employment (CE) is the largest single programme available to help long-term unemployed people get back to work. It also plays a crucial role in providing workers for community, environmental and sporting organisations throughout the country.

Rapid employment growth in employment and reports of labour shortages led to the DETE commissioning Deloitte and Touche (D&T) to review the relevance of the CE programme. The recommendations in their report include a cut of 8,000 places in the scheme and a reallocation of the savings from this towards training. It also proposes that under 25s be excluded from CE.

These proposals directly conflict with commitments under Partnership 2000 to increase the number of places on CE and the Full-time Jobs Initiative by 10,000. Only 2,000 of these have been delivered (in the 1997 Budget).

The Government estimates for 1999 show an £11 million cut in provision for CE and a £1 million cut in funding for training for the unemployed.

This Briefing highlights the key recommendations for the D&T report. It argues that:

• While the report concludes that something other than CE would be more effective for many people, it fails to say what such alternatives would be or how they would be delivered and made accessible to people.
• The report’s conclusion, that provision for the long-term unemployed should be scaled down, is contradicted by their own findings, and information from other sources.