Frances Fitzgerald (Fine Gael)

This pushes the disadvantaged into the poverty trap and encourages the black economy. There is no logic because there is a poverty trap for hard-working families trying to make ends meet. The State should not support a scheme that does that.

The other aspects of the problem are that community child care providers experience a continuing decrease in direct funding. This makes it extremely difficult or impossible to maintain services. A number of services have closed. One cannot definitively say this is because of the subvention scheme but I would ask what reports the Minister's Department is receiving about services closing.

We have been told that many services will have no alternative but to shut their doors on communities which depend on the provision of child care. The number of children with whom community child care providers work will be vastly reduced if this happens. Jobs will be lost in the sector and the quality will be compromised. This is a real problem. One child care provider in Dublin's north west inner city has estimated a total loss of income as a result of the scheme of €151,000. That is enormous. These are services being provided to the most disadvantaged areas and it is a serious loss of revenue to pay staff and build up child care places. There will be job losses.

Providers cannot assess their annual budget because funding depends on the number of children availing of the service and working parents cannot afford the large increases in child care costs. Forward planning is very difficult for those child care providers. This will affect families but will have a disproportionate effect on women. Women will leave the workforce if they do not get the kind of support they need from child care. The number of women entering the workforce is increasing. The recent OECD report, Babies and Bosses, revealed that 51% of women in the workforce have a child aged between zero and three years and 52% between three and six years of age, yet we continue to lag behind many other countries. The OECD report also found that in 2006, 30% of disposable income was spent on early child care. That compares with an 8% average in the rest of Europe. Despite all the money going in, the expense of and lack of access to child care is still extremely problematic. It impacts on families and quality of life for women and men.

Ireland's rating for publicly funded child care facilities is very low. We are still failing to provide the sort of early child care services that we should and that would be good for children and families. The Minister of State is doing his best to watch over his funding and ensure he can change the situation. I ask him to radically overhaul the community child care subvention scheme. All sorts of segregation will arise in the community child care facilities for them to get their funding. There will not be the kind of mix of families on different incomes — families on social welfare and working families — in the community child care services. The mix worked well; it was good for children, families and services. There is serious pressure on the community child care services and I ask the Minister of State to radically overhaul it, to liaise and consult further with the providers, parents and community. The early research on the subvention scheme suggests that it does not work.