Reforms to help those on the live register

A system to identify those at greatest risk of long-term unemployment will be "urgently examined" by Minister for Social and Family Affairs Séamus Brennan.

He said he wanted to introduce reforms to break down the barriers to people leaving long-term unemployment. Mr Brennan was speaking yesterday at the publication of research, carried out by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), looking at the characteristics of people who were staying on the live register for a year or more.

The research, Profiling the Unemployed: An Analysis of the Galway and Waterford Live-Register Surveys, began in 2000, with surveys of 1,400 customers on the live register in Galway and the same number in Waterford.

Follow-up surveys, carried out in 2002, found a "highly structured relationship between a relatively small number of personal characteristics and duration on the live register", say the authors.

The most important issues were educational attainment and age - particularly in men.

Other influential issues were whether or not they had access to transport, ill health, previous long periods of unemployment or full-time caring responsibilities.

Co-author of the report, Richard Layte, explained that such predictors were then ranked and incorporated into a scoring system which could be applied to predict whether a person coming onto the live register would face problems leaving it.

Describing it as "very effective", he said the scoring system could predict with an efficiency of up to 85 per cent those who would become long-term unemployed. "This is a very efficient way to predict whether a person needs interventions, such as advice on interview technique, further training, literacy help or motivational help."

Co-author of the report, Philip O'Connell stressed unemployment had fallen from 15 per cent in the 1980s to about 4 per cent today. "But unemployment is still an issue and particularly so for those who are long-term unemployed. Anything the State can do to ease the transition from unemployment to employment is important," he said.