Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is a significant driver of our costs. Tusla and the HSE have a protocol for children with a very significant disability who are now in the care of Tusla. From a budgetary point of view, there is a shared responsibility for meeting the needs of those children. That is a significant driver of costs too. As the Deputy knows, in 2024, we have taken significant steps to boost foster care, particularly by increasing the foster care allowance. We had a €25 increase on 1 January and there will be a €50 increase on 1 November. That will represent an extra €1,700 for foster carers this year and an extra €3,900 for foster carers next year. I have engaged extensively with the organisations representing foster carers because we want to keep that significant number of foster carers and families supported by foster carers. There were 308 residential care placements in August this year.

Recognising the importance of investment in Tusla and the vulnerability of the children who Tusla looks after, in budget 2025 we secured a significant increase in Tusla funding of an additional €145 million. When I came into this Department, Tusla funding was around €800 million. It is now well in excess of €1 billion. That is important because of the significance of the needs of these children. I have looked to resource Tusla to meet the very significant needs that it has to deal with.

Regarding early years, we might separate the national childcare scheme, NCS, and core funding. The NCS is the subsidy that we provide to services which then take that money off parents' bills.

We have grown that significantly over the past two years. That is enabling us to cut costs on average for parents by 50%. The vast majority of services around the country offer the NCS. It is a condition of core funding that a service provider offers the NCS. As we are now saving a lot more parents money on the NCS, more parents are signing up. That is why we have had to increase the Estimate for 2024. It is more money but that is good because the policy is working. More parents are taking up the NCS, using early learning care for the first time or increasing the number of hours.

The other element is core funding and that may be what providers engaging with the Deputy are concerned about. Last year, 94.5% of services had signed up to core funding by year end. Currently, the sign-up number for this year is 91%. We are at the same point this year as we were this time last year. A number of high-profile services announced over the summer that they would withdraw but subsequently a couple came back in later on because of the changes we made, particularly in allowing for a fee increase for certain services if they meet certain criteria. As I said, 91% are signed up to core funding right now but we expect that to grow in the weeks to come.

I visit early learning care services regularly. The issue of bureaucracy comes up all the time. Earlier this year, we initiated an action plan on the administrative burden services face. We have been working on that. We brought in an advisory group made up of providers to set out exactly on a day-to-day basis the challenges, paperwork and flaws with online systems they experience. We will publish that before the end of the year. In 2025, we will work through each of the points in terms of how we reduce the administrative burden. I am conscious of it and I want to address it. We assigned a team in the Department which is now working on drafting this action plan and implementing it. I also met a group representing a significant number of providers recently. We are looking to make sure there is a new provider subgroup as part of the early years forum so that where specific issues come up about which providers are concerned, they have an avenue to raise it directly with our Department.

Those are the key elements of the questions the Deputy asked. I will now refer over to the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte.