Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise that I cannot join the meeting in person as I am trying to keep track of the proceedings in another committee as well. I welcome the opportunity to engage with officials from the Department.

I think all of us feel a little bit frustrated, none more so, I am sure, than the representatives of the Department, that at a time when we are spending large amounts of public funds on childcare, which is increasing year on year, we seem to be getting an endless stream of communication from providers expressing dissatisfaction with where we are at. I concur with the sentiments of the previous speakers in terms of all the emails we have received over the past 48 hours.

I want to raise two issues. While welcome in many respects, the new funding model for childcare appears not to assist in any meaningful way the providers who are delivering the ECCE-only model. I visited a number of them in constituency. As far as I can see, it is not an urban or rural issue but generally a case of whether the childcare provider is large or small. The small childcare providers, who, because of parental choice, are delivering the ECCE-only model, seem to be significantly financially disadvantaged under the new funding model for childcare.

I understand the Minister has committed to an overview of the funding regime. If I recall correctly from replies to parliamentary questions, it is Queen's University Belfast that is carrying out this overview. When can we expect the report and, more important, when can we expect some lifeline for those providers in the ECCE-only model? I fear that quite a number of them will go out of business. I suspect the overwhelming majority of those who have already gone out of business are smaller ECCE-only providers both in urban and rural settings. That is unfortunate because it is a model of childcare choice. People do not need full daycare in all circumstances. The ECCE model is very important of itself.

I concur with the points made by previous speakers about the accounting issues that arise. It appears that we are in danger of swamping providers, in particular small and medium providers, with the increasing demands of regulation. If these were about child welfare issues, I do not think anybody would object. We have made a lot of progress in that area, rightly so, but it does appear that day after day, there is one demand after another. We are incrementally suffocating these businesses with regulation and red tape. The most recent requirement is for what is virtually a second set of accounts. For small businesses there comes a time when they will say enough is enough and they are not going to stay in the business. In the current economic environment there are a lot of opportunities for people to do other things. It is only when we see a flight from the childcare sector that we will realise what we have done.

Having said that, I acknowledge that enormous progress has been made. There has been a very substantial increase in public funds for childcare but we need to be extremely vigilant that we are not putting people out of business as a result of the increasing administrative demands being imposed on them. All of that has perhaps been articulated by others far better than I can articulate it but I just wanted to add my voice to the concerns among childcare providers. As far as I can determine from visits that I have made to such providers in my constituency over a period of time, they tend to be the smaller providers and in some respects the more niche providers, as in ECCE-only providers.

I would like the Department and Minister to reflect on that and find a way to ensure that we can accommodate all of these important providers, large or small, urban or rural, to continue in the business.