Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Let me put the child care budget in context. Between 2008 and 2011, €384 million, or 60%, was removed from it. Between 2011 and 2014, I increased overall funding to the early years child care sector by €14 million. These are the financial and overall economic challenges that we face in dealing with the issue of affordable and accessible child care, which the Deputy rightly stated was a key issue.

My Department administers two targeted schemes that provide subvention for low-income parents to take up child care places, namely, the community child care subvention, CCS, and the child care education and training programme. As the Deputy is aware, two new elements were introduced in 2013 to support eligible parents in taking up employment opportunities and to provide child care for community employment, CE, scheme participants.

The CCS programme provides funding to community child care services to enable them to provide high-quality child care at reduced rates to low-income working parents. The programme is also accessible to parents who have relatively average incomes on the basis of their entitlement to hold general practitioner, GP, visit cards. As well as assisting families with the cost of such child care, the objective of the programme is to ensure that funding is focused where lifetime benefits are highest for families. We want to provide high-quality child care for children as well.

A number of issues have been identified with the schemes, including varying rates of subvention and different eligibilities, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties for those operating the schemes. I have decided to review the two programmes to consider how best to structure future child care support for working families and to incentivise labour market activation.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House

The participation of the wider child care sector in the review will be considered as the internal review progresses. It is not possible at this stage to determine when the review will be finalised.

Around €260 million annually is provided to support the child care programmes. This figure includes €175 million allocated for the free preschool year under the early childhood care and education programme. The total number of children benefiting from support under the programmes is in excess of 100,000. It should be noted that while a review of the schemes should support more effective targeting, I do not expect that this review on its own will result in increased capacity. Any overall increase in supports is likely to require additional investment. The difficult position in the public finances that this Government has had to contend with has worked against increased investment to date but, as they recover in the coming years, it will be important to channel any funding that becomes available to schemes that fulfil their objectives as effectively as possible.

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