Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 20:

In page 13, line 19, to delete "and".

Section 13 requires the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs to have regard when making regulations on the number of hours of financial support awarded to whether an applicant and his or her partner are engaged in work or study. The provision is intended to support families to get out of poverty through labour market participation by enabling full-time child care whenever a parent is engaged in work or study and ensuring, at the same time, that a certain level of child care support is available for all families regardless of labour market situation. Amendments Nos. 21 and 23 will permit exemptions to be made to this work-study test in prescribed situations where the applicant or the applicant's partner is unavailable to care for a child for reasons unrelated to work or study by allowing the possibility of full-time child care support in those situations. Examples of situations which may be prescribed include situations in which an applicant's partner is in prison or hospital in the long term. In such cases, the applicant's partner will not satisfy the definitions of work or study but the applicant should still be eligible for full-time child care support if he or she is engaged in work or study. To provide for this possibility, amendment No. 23 requires the Minister to have regard to the unavailability of the applicant or his or her partner to care for the child and amendment No. 21 enables the Minister to make regulations defining the meaning of the term "unavailable" for the purposes of the scheme.

In addition to the above amendment, I intend to undertake focused research in the coming months on the work-study test, the exemptions proposed in these amendments and their potential collective impact in disadvantaged communities. This research will inform the regulations to be made under section 13. In particular, the work will inform the definitions of "work" and "study", the situations in which the exemptions from work and study test will apply and both the standard and enhanced hours of child care subsidy to be provided.

In addition, amendment No. 23 also addresses the way in which the scheme will wrap around the ECCE preschool programme and school hours. Section 13(6)(c) of the Bill requires the Minister when making regulations on the hours of financial support available to have regard to the period of time each week the child qualifies to participate in pre-school programmes. This wording is consistent with current ECCE rules in which eligibility for ECCE is determined simply by the child's age. It would also be consistent with certain changes to ECCE rules, including those planned for this coming September, which will create two full years' of entitlement. However, it is important to further future-proof the legislation to accommodate potential changes to the ECCE rules to offer parents some flexibility around choosing when to take up an ECCE entitlement. This possibility would require the affordable child care scheme to wrap around ECCE from the time the child is actually enrolled in that programme rather than from a single age at which the child qualifies for ECCE. In order to allow for this possibility, amendment No. 23 seeks to require the Minister to have regard either to eligibility to enrol in ECCE or to a child's actual enrolment in ECCE.

As to school hours, the amendment requires the Minister to have regard both to enrolment in school and to eligibility to enrol in school. Enrolment is relevant to children aged four and five years for whom school is not compulsory. Once children have reached the compulsory school age of six years, the affordable child care scheme will wrap around school hours for all children. As such, it is eligibility to enrol in school that matters.

I must also stress that these are technical amendments. They do not alter the policy of the affordable child care scheme itself, rather they future-proof the scheme so that it is sufficiently flexible to wrap around ECCE in both its current format and in future potential scenarios.