153. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment the estimated cost of increasing Local Enterprise Office funding by 5%, 10%, 20%, 25% and 50%, in tabular form. [50038/26]

My Department provides funding to the Local Enterprise Offices through the A8 (Enterprise Development) subhead. This funding is allocated to each of the 31 Local Authorities based on a distribution model agreed between Enterprise Ireland and the Local Authorities.

Capital funding is used to support enterprise development through direct grant assistance, training, mentoring as well as Lean, Green and Digital productivity programmes. The non-pay budget is my Department’s contribution to the administrative costs of running the LEOs and includes a contribution towards the salaries of the Local Authority staff who work in the LEOs.The estimated cost of increasing this budget is set out in the table below:

Estimated cost increasing budget