The follow excerpts from Snip2 report which deal with support for businesses. Please let me know what I am missing?
2.5 Supports for enterprise
At present, State supports for enterprise and job-creation are delivered by a range of agencies across a number of Government Departments. The Special Group proposes that enterprise supports for indigenous industry should instead be delivered through a single agency, led by a strong management team and operating under well-defined oversight mechanisms. This would allow for common measurement and reporting of effectiveness across the variety of enterprise supports, and would facilitate a more coherent and proportionate approach to the provision of financial and other supports to different industries.
The existing agencies differ in terms of their geographic focus (local, regional or international), the size of companies being supported, and the sectors involved (whether general or specific). The Group makes the following observations in relation to these agencies:
• expenditure and staffing levels have risen over the period 2003 to 2008 with no obvious associated increase in outputs;
• there is a high degree of overlap across the services delivered by the agencies (e.g. training, grant assistance);
• there is significant duplication of overseas representation with Enterprise Ireland, the IDA,
An Bord Bia and Tourism Ireland operating independent overseas office networks; and
• there is a lack of consistency in reporting what is achieved in terms of cost effectiveness (estimated grant per job). Based on the available information, there are significant variations between the agencies in the estimated average grant cost per job suggesting that some agencies are less cost effective than others.
It is proposed that the County and City Enterprise Boards, the Business Innovation Centres, the Western Development Commission and the enterprise functions of Údarás na Gaeltachta, Shannon Development, Bord Iascaigh Mhara, LEADER and Teagasc, as well as sector-specific agencies such as the Irish Film Board, should be merged within a re-constituted Enterprise Ireland.
The streamlined agency should also lead to major savings in overall administration costs including staff numbers. The Group considers that the new enterprise body should operate a regional office network based upon the nine Gateways identified in the National Spatial Strategy, leading to savings in local office accommodation costs. Savings in overseas office costs would also arise.
and from Volume 2:
C.3 Cease funding FÁS Services to Business and Skillnets
The Group was not convinced by the argument that the funding of €27m provided through FÁS Services to Business and Skillnets is a necessary catalyst in the provision of training by businesses to their own employees. The Group is not convinced that any market failure exists and recommends that these activities be stopped as employers can provide for their own requirements.
Mostly this makes sense to me. The devil here is in the implementation - if agencies which are effective at present (ie CEB's) get amalgamated into EI along with a host of others and there is no rework from the ground up of how EI is structured with a strong client centric focus used to guide the merger then the net effect will be to disrupt the support which is currently delivered to entrepreneurs as opposed to making it better.
The previous merger of Forbairt, the Irish Trade Board and parts of FAS took nearly a decade to settle down.
keith
UPDATE - Links to the reports underneath (pdf format)
Volume 1
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