Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the budget that was delivered yesterday. I will primarily speak to my own portfolio as the Fianna Fáil spokesperson for children and youth affairs. My colleague, Deputy Thomas Byrne, said rightly that the Government is quick to promise and slow to deliver. Childcare is an example of that.

In 2016, the access and inclusion model, AIM, was announced. Some 3,800 were approved for it and only 2,300 could avail of it because there were not the staff. How can staff be expected to live and pay a mortgage when they are working 15 hours a week in an early childhood care and education, ECCE, setting? It cannot be done. I call on the Minister to take action and address that matter because, until such time as it is addressed, we will not be able to provide a service and look after those children. An access inclusion model is to include all children of all abilities into their local childcare setting. It is the first step of early intervention in giving them the right to education and we still cannot fund it. That model was announced in the 2016 budget and it has still not been delivered.

In 2017, to much fanfare, the affordable childcare scheme was announced. It finally came to fruition a week ago although, even then, only for those people who choose to ignore the issue with the public services card. The people who do not want to give their public services card, or sign up to mygov.ie,have to wait until January 2020 for the paper model. That will be four and a half years after the scheme was announced.

That is what the Government is doing for children. That is what has been delivered. There has been lots of fanfare and many press opportunities but the delivery has been very slow. Parents who, three years ago, had a child who was approximately a year old and entering crèche are coming out the other side of the experience having got the benefit of early childhood care and education scheme but very little or nothing by way of subsidy or subvention.

After all the fanfare, what are parents facing today? We are encouraging women to go back into the workforce, be it through education or the activation model. Under an old model, if one wanted to go back into education, one had the opportunity under a set scheme to get childcare support for 40 hours a week. What have we done in this budget and what have we done to all the parents previously? We have reduced that from 40 hours to 15 hours. We have acknowledged it ever so slightly by moving from 15 hours to 20 hours but that is very little opportunity for that person who is going back to education. Take, for example, a woman who will have to travel for an hour after dropping off her child in Portumna, if she has to go to Galway. She will have to travel an hour back again after attending classes. That is more than 20 hours a week. There is a requirement there for full-time childcare because there are not regular bus stops in those areas I am talking about. There is transport in the mornings and again in the evening. That is what happens and what is available outside the M50. People do not have the opportunity to get on a bus or a train. They must go at nine o'clock in the morning and come home at 5 o'clock in the evening. That is why the measure to reduce childcare support from 40 hours to 15 hours and then back up to 20 hours is ridiculous. The Government is leaving people behind. It is squandering people's opportunities. We are forcing people to stay within the social welfare system. That is what we are encouraging because now they have to pay the difference.

Childcare costs for the lady I am talking about would be another €56. She receives €237 as a lone parent and 25% of that would be gone already in subsidising her childcare to the level it was subsidised until 2016. It is ridiculous and I am disappointed that we are not putting children at the centre of our budgeting.

It is weird to think that so many speakers have come into the House before me and childcare has always been put on the back foot while, at the same time, we say we need to keep this country going. We say we need more women in the workforce and childcare must be at the centre of our policies. It gets very little attention.

Deputy Thomas Byrne also spoke about the "Prime Time Investigates" programmes. It is very disappointing that "Prime Time Investigates" dictates our policy and budget. Some €29 million of the budget that was announced yesterday is to go towards the inspectorate service in Tusla because the "Prime Time Investigates" programme on 29 July showed that the inspectorate was under-resourced. There are not enough people working in the sector. In the past two years, under this Government, we have gone from having inspections every 18 months to once every three years. We talk about assuring parents of a quality service that is underpinned by the regulator in Tusla and that is not being monitored because checks are not happening often enough. They do not have the staff. We acknowledged it yesterday in the budget because we have laid out money for it. It is very unfortunate that we are not keeping our fingers on the pulse. The Government is reactionary, not proactive, and that is very disappointing when children are supposed to be at the centre of all our actions. The voice of the child is not being heard.

It was also regrettable that, in yesterday's budget, the Minister laid out no money whatsoever for the recruitment of social workers. The front-line staff that delivers the service for Tusla are the social care workers. In the past four years, the budget of Tusla has increased by 21%, of which only 4% went to social workers. They are the people who are supporting the families at the front line. They are overburdened with caseloads but we still do not recruit more. What really bothers me is that we have outsourced it to agency. An agency can get and recruit social workers. Why are we not investing in our own sector? It does not make any sense not to invest in it.

The budget was not the only report published yesterday. A spending review into the effectiveness of Tusla as an agency of the State was also published. The conclusion of the report was that there is insufficient data collected on the level of expenditure and the number of staff at the service programme level for the years 2014 to 2018 to allow for an evaluation of the efficiency of the service provided by Tusla. For example, while the agency tracks the number of children with an allocated social worker, it does not track the number of times, and how often, a social worker is making contact with a child. Anecdotally, I understand that these contacts are not happening often enough and the social workers are overwhelmed by the number of cases they are expected to manage. We have heard all that at the Joint Committee on Children and Youth Affairs over the past 12 months. Social workers are totally and utterly overburdened. For an agency that is in receipt of more than €800 million of public funding every year, this is not good enough.

Since her appointment, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Zappone, has been promising to improve Tusla's system on data collection and management. This year is no different. In 2016, investment was required for the ICT system and, in 2017, more money had to go into the ICT system. It was delivered and came on-stream in August 2018. That was required so that staff knew if a child moved from Galway to Dublin and we moved away from a paper-based model. The model is now failing to track how the social care workers are performing and the caseloads they are managing.

I am laying out to the Minister tonight that we have heard a lot of talk and there is much noise but the delivery has been very slow. I am very disappointed by what I have seen for children in the past four years under this Government.

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