Mr. Toby Wolfe:

On the regulatory aspect of minimising the burden on providers, clearly, the regulations are very important and they are the minimum standards to protect children but, wherever possible, we look for ways to minimise the burden to ensure they are proportionate. One significant change that was made last year was a change to the reregistration system. In the past, if someone was reregistering, which they have to do every three years, effectively, they had to go through the entire initial registration process again. We changed the regulations and worked with Tusla, and it is now a much more streamlined process where it is really just the minimum. People have to prove they have up-to-date Garda vetting and that the insurance is still in place, and they just declare whether there is any change to their initial registration. It is a much improved and streamlined process.

Regulatory reform is also part of the process that my colleagues were talking about, in that we are developing this action plan on administrative and regulatory reform. We will be listening to the sector for any other suggestions about ways in which we could further streamline the regulations consistent with continuing to protect children adequately.

The inspection system is also part of what we look at in trying to ensure that we have proportionate arrangements in place. For some years, we have been working closely with the two inspectorates to ensure that they, for example, align the timings of their inspections so they do not go into the same provider too close to each other. We asked the OECD to do a review of our inspection system a couple of years ago and it made a series of recommendations that we are working through, which includes taking further steps to streamline and better co-ordinate our inspection system.