Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton today said lessons needed to be learned in relation to Fás as she unveiled a report that strongly criticises the State's past support in getting jobseekers back to work.
A new Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) study of how State agencies encourage and assist the jobless to return to work has found that they have had limited success and are in some cases counterproductive.
"It is important that it [the report] has been published and we learn the lessons from this report. We are going to bring the employment side of Fás into the employment side of department of Social Protection," said Ms Burton.
She said there needed to be a change in "mindset and culture" in the agencies helping people to get back to work. "I think the people who work in Fás are anxious and eager to do that and are quite capable of doing it when they join the department," she said.
"A lot of changes have already taken place in Fás and also in the structure of my department since the study was conducted," she said, adding a new national employment and entitlement service should be up and running within a year.
The report proposes that those in receipt of benefits be compelled to seek work or accept training in return for their entitlements. It wants this new approach to be backed by “effective monitoring and sanctions”.
Overall, it finds that those who are assisted by the State while on the dole were less likely to return to work than the average welfare recipient.
The reason for this, the report postulates, is that welfare recipients learned “as a consequence of the process, that they were unlikely to face monitoring or sanctions as a result of failure to search actively for, or obtain, employment, leading to some decline in job search intensity”.
Participation in programmes run by Fás was found to increase the probability of subsequent employment by between 10 and 14 per cent.
However, Fás “activation interviews” with jobseekers were found to impact negatively on job prospects, with the chances of entering employment being about 17 per cent lower for those who went through the interview process.
As a result, “the cumulative effect of training plus activation interview was either zero, or at best weakly positive”, the authors said.
Among a number of questionable practices by State agencies, the study found that those signing on after losing a job who had claimed unemployment benefit in the past were excluded from active assistance in job searches and training.
The report says that this “would appear to run counter to the underlying rationale of activation policies, namely, to assist those most likely to encounter difficulties in the labour market to find work”.
Another failing identified was that one in four of those unemployed people eligible for assistance by the State – in the form of training schemes and specific help in job searches – were not in fact identified by the relevant authorities. Poor communications between the Department of Social Protection and Fás, the State training agency, were found to be the primary reason for the failure.
The report says, however, that ongoing improvements should help prevent welfare recipients falling through the cracks in this manner in the future.
On introducing an element of compulsion for those receiving benefits, the report stresses “the potential benefits of Ireland following best practice in most European countries”.
