UNEMPLOYMENT will not be brought down to 100,000 until 2006 even if the current high level of economic growth continues, according to the Task Force on Long Term Unemployment.
In this context its proposals in its report, released yesterday, are modest. It calls for community employment schemes to be more sharply focused on the long term unemployed, subsidies for employers recruiting from their ranks and the creation of a pilot scheme to provide 1,000 people with socially useful employment on a trial basis.
Those chosen for the scheme should be over 34, live in disadvantaged areas and have been unemployed for at least five years. They should be paid "the going rate" to carry out socially useful community based work, says the report. The pilot scheme should be evaluated over a three year period and, if successful, extended to other areas.
Acknowledging its modest scope, the Tanaiste, Mr Spring, described the proposals yesterday as realistic. They set "the right balance" given the Government's other priorities, which he listed as protecting economic growth through responsible management of public finances, ensuring social justice and reducing the tax burden on individuals.
"The essential balance we have to strike is between protecting a high level of growth and ensuring that its benefits are fairly and wisely distributed," he said. He added the long term unemployed posed a particularly intractable problem. While they comprised half of those on the dole, they only filled one out of every 16 vacancies which arose.
Put in its financial context, the scheme would cost the Exchequer around £110 million a year. More ambitious options considered by the task force would have had a net cost of up to £330 million a year.
However, these were never really practicable, not just because of the cost, but also because even this sort of outlay would only provide part time employment for around half of the State's long term unemployed.
The report concentrates on how to reintegrate the latter into the mainstream labour market. It proposes retaining community employment schemes as a central component for providing training and work experience. It also proposes that eligibility criteria be tightened to ensure more community employment posts go to this group. At present nearly a third go to people who have been registered as unemployed for less than a year.
It says there should be a tightly targeted subsidy to employers prepared to take on the long term unemployed. The subsidy should be for at least a year and would be based on the age of the recruit and the length of time out of work
Employers should also be asked to give short term work experience to around 10,000 long term unemployed each year. The task force envisages that the community employment programmes will continue to cater for around 40,000 placements a year.
The report is critical of the time it has taken to establish the local employment service, which was originally proposed by the National Economic and Social Forum in 1994. It says the social partners and community groups should be fully involved in setting up the pilot schemes, due to begin later this year.
The Tanaiste gave a commitment at a press conference to launch the report yesterday that there would be local involvement. Government sources said later that local employment service schemes would "be very closely monitored" to ensure a strong voluntary and community input.
Responding to criticism that there were too many agencies dealing with the unemployed, Mr Spring said a more co ordinated approach was being developed. He described the proliferation of reports in different departments on the problem as "healthy competition" and valuable additions to the debate.
He accepted that trade unions might be worried at the potential for community employment schemes to eliminate jobs elsewhere, but said the task force proposals guarded against this problem.