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

I thank the Chairman for the positive comments on progress to date. The Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade was questioned about some of these issues today in the House and he said that we are on an incremental path of increasing the investment and trying to move towards that target. Incremental does not necessarily mean slow. We have done some things quite rapidly in the past three or four years in terms of increasing investment by over 117%. That is my first point.

Second, to move from 0.5% of GDP to the OECD average of 0.7% will require a significant amount of extra investment. In increasing it rather rapidly in the last couple of years my practice has been to outline a rationale for the importance of finding additional money to prioritise the development of the infrastructure for childcare. In the last budget, the arguments I made largely surrounded not only the importance of this type of support for children in terms of their early learning and care and the developmental aspects of that but also the fact that we need more investment to support parents who wish to return to education and training. Many of them are inhibited from doing that due to the fact that it still costs too much for them to feel that they are going to receive additional benefits for doing it. Part of what we are trying to do is identify Estimates for each year where if we increase by X% it will be enough to include some of the people who are trying to make a decision to go back to work, and within enough time to plan for that, and ensure that it will make enough of a difference for them to do that. Taking this approach and spending in this way will not necessarily overheat the economy because we are increasing our productive capacity. Those are some of the arguments I made in respect of the last budget.

As the committee is aware, we recently launched the national early years strategy for the next ten years, entitled "First 5". In that strategy we identify not only the vision for how we wish to increase investment but also the rationale for the approaches we are taking to get much closer to the OECD target. The affordable childcare scheme is the main tool for that. We must continue to increase the subsidies per child per week depending on the type of care the child requires. We are also committed to increasing thresholds. When one identifies a certain percentage of increases that one wishes to make for families in terms of incomes and so forth, working back from that helps to determine the type of threshold that would be required to increase living standards for families in a significant way. With regard to that aspect of the question, we do not simply say we are going to try to reach 0.01%, for example, of an increase next year but instead we examine and try to calculate what we require to have a meaningful increase in the living standards of families according to the type of family involved. That is the main aspect of trying to calculate the figures, and I have many of the people who do that well with me today.

There is another aspect to the increase in investment. It is important to talk about the average percentage increase that is required to build the childcare infrastructure but if we always average the amounts we do not necessarily take account of the ways in which people are impacted differently because of the differential in their family income. Therefore we will also be seeking to get enough money to pay more into a new model that we want to develop for early learning and care, which we call the DEIS-type model, where we make more investment in arenas which require it more. Again, this is to assist levelling the playing field for our children.

I am not talking about percentages per sebut the rationale which I hope will persuade Government to prioritise even more significantly than it has done in the past. This is about the development of a new funding model for the early learning and care services in which more is invested in more settings and where higher quality can be delivered, at the same time as ensuring modest fees for families and better pay and working conditions for staff.