Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

I wish to share my time with Deputy Kelly.

I am pleased to address the House and I welcome the provisions of the Finance Bill 2006 which give effect to many of the initiatives announced by the Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, in the budget for 2006. As Minister of State with special responsibility for children, I especially welcomed the decision announced in the budget to introduce a new child care strategy spanning the years 2006 to 2010 and the subsequent announcement by the Taoiseach of the establishment of the new office of the Minister with responsibility for children. My responsibilities include the issues of child welfare and protection, early childhood care and education and youth justice. The office has been staffed with key officials from each of these areas, thus bringing together their expertise. Housing together all these issues in one vision of care, protection and provision for children will empower me to make real change and progress on these vital issues. As Minister of State with special responsibility for children, I am honoured with the unprecedented opportunity to develop and deliver policies and programmes which will help ensure the well-being of all our children.

Since 1997, child care has been to the forefront of Government policy. Deputies are aware of the significant achievements made under the equal opportunities child care programme, which ran from 2000 to this year. A general agreement had emerged and the time had come to take a long-term view of current child care policies with a view to adopting a more strategic approach to the delivery of services and meeting the current demands of parents. The recent Government decisions relating to child care represent a comprehensive response to the call from the child care sector, parents in particular, for greater funding to be made available for child care and the adoption of a more cohesive approach to the delivery of child care services.

The Government has adopted a new child care strategy for the period 2006-10. It is a comprehensive strategic approach by the Government to the emerging needs of future development of the sector. One of its key elements is the national child care investment programme, which is effective from 1 January 2006 and supersedes the previous programme. Unlike its predecessor, the new programme is entirely Exchequer funded and the Government has committed €575 million to it over the five year term.

The decision by the Government to create a major new five year investment programme immediately rather than waiting until the equal opportunities programme expired is evidence of our commitment to the provision of quality child care. The programme aims to provide a response to the development of quality child care supports and services, which are grounded in an understanding of local needs. It will build on the existing programme and incorporate a number of key objectives, such as the creation of 50,000 additional child care places, including 5,000 after-school places and 10,000 pre-school places aimed at three to four year olds. It aims at improving the quality of early childhood care and education, including part-time full day care, school age child care and child minding, supporting families in breaking the cycle of disadvantage and supporting a co-ordinated approach to the delivery of child care, which is centred on the needs of the child.

The Government has set ambitious targets for the next five years, including the creation of 17,000 additional trained child care personnel. I am committed to ensuring that we meet these targets and objectives in a way that takes account of the need for pre-school child care, school age child care and wrap around services that meet the specific needs of parents and their children. It will require careful planning and incremental development but I am confident that I have been given the necessary tools and resources to deliver on them.

The availability of the additional capital funding announced in the budget will enable me to allocate capital grant assistance to groups that address significant child care service gaps. The maximum capital grants available for the building or expansion of child care facilities will be €1 million per facility for community based not-for-profit providers. There will be a strong focus on private provider applications, with a maximum capital grant of €100,000 per facility and a maximum of €500,000 per provider in the case of multiple services in different catchment areas.

The new national child care investment programme will continue to assist with staffing and other operating costs in community facilities that cannot meet the full costs on fee income alone. Staffing grant assistance under the previous programme will be continued until the end of 2007 to ensure that there will be no break in the momentum built up and the transition to the new programme is a smooth one.

A key element of the new programme is the decision to deliver it at local level through the city and county child care committees, which were established under the previous investment programme and have been an active force at local level. They identify and meet local child care needs and facilitate greater flexibility in our responsiveness to those needs. This will involve building closer links between infrastructural development and the planning regulations under the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. I propose to work closely with that Department to strengthen the links at national and local levels between the relevant players, including the planning authorities, the county development boards and the city and county child care committees.

The legislative provision for the new early child care supplement will be provided for in the forthcoming Social Welfare and Pensions Bill 2005. It is worth commenting on it today as it forms an important part of the child care package. It is an additional payment of €1,000 in a full calendar year in respect of all children aged under six years. The payment will be effective from 1 April and be a direct non-taxable payment of €250 paid per quarter year in respect of each eligible child.

See this speech in context