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

I thank the Acting Chair for his kind remarks. I thank Senator Currie for facilitating the debate today and, in particular, I thank her for her report on better planning for local childcare because it very usefully highlights some of the high-level planning challenges that exist at the moment. It illustrates those through case studies, many of which I am familiar with from our Dublin West constituency, and it sets out five concrete and important recommendations. I hope towards the end of my speech to speak to how I feel our Department is moving towards addressing all five of them, I hope. The Senator's remarks regarding the Minister for housing, Deputy O'Brien, being here earlier today are useful. Only one of the recommendations can be done by my Department alone and a significant number of them lie primarily with the Department of housing or with local authorities. That co-operation exists between our Department and the Department of housing and we want to continue to strengthen that.

I will speak to the high level at the start before becoming back to the specific recommendations. Senator Cassells reminded us where we were in 2020. Those of us who ran in the general election that year remember a massive demonstration in Dublin city two weeks before the vote. Parents, childcare providers and childcare professionals came together to highlight the crisis in their system. I will always recognise that, despite everything I am about to say, there are still real challenges in childcare today and we have a lot more to do, but we are in a significantly better place than where we were in 2020.

When I came into office, I set three key goals, namely, cutting the cost of childcare for parents, increasing pay for childcare professionals and ensuring sustainability for childcare providers. We have significantly advanced on all three of those key goals. Capacity is now the big challenge and we are responding to that issue as well. Some of the capacity challenge has been created as a result of making childcare more affordable, which means more parents are taking it up. That is a good thing but it creates a new challenge and we will rise to meet that particular challenge as well.

As regards meeting each of those three initial challenges, I will deal first with affordability. The combination of the fee freeze, which we will talk about more in a moment, and the two increases in the national childcare scheme, NCS, are delivering cuts in parents' fees. The first increase was on 1 January 2023 and the second will be on 2 September 2024 and they are having a very significant impact on parents. We have almost doubled the number of children using the NCS in the term of this Government, from approximately 60,000 to approximately 120,000 now. That is a huge increase in the number of children and parents benefitting from a very significant State subsidy. By linking core funding to the NCS, we have increased the number of services offering the NCS by 22%. That is why we have been able to increase the numbers because more services are offering this.

Regarding the amazing childcare professionals in this country, in September 2022 we secured for the first time a pay agreement for them with statutorily mandated levels of pay. We secured a second pay agreement in June 2024. Those basic levels of pay are still not enough, but it is an important step that was only possible because of Government intervention through an employment regulation order, ERO, and the Government actually stepping up with fund through core funding to allow services to meet the cost of that extra pay. The EROs in other sectors do not have the Government stepping up with the money but we do have that in the early years sector and we have made very significant strides. In fairness to SIPTU, the early years union, I spoke at its annual conference in March and it recognised the really important steps that have been taken to support childcare workers.

In terms of the sustainability of providers and recognising the huge diversity of provision, from community to private, from one-person services to large, multi-setting services, we have introduced core funding to create a mechanism to support that. Core funding is a really important and positive step. It is not perfect and I have never said that it is. It is important to note that core funding has changed as we go into year three. In year one, core funding was €206 million. The funding was very much linked to the number of hours a service did and the capacity or number of spaces it had. That formula automatically benefited larger services that worked for longer.

We changed that in year two having heard from the smaller services that they felt it was not recognising their particular challenges. We brought in a new rate of just over €4,000 specifically for sessional services. We brought in a floor of €8,000 below which the core funding allocation could not fall. This year, we have increased both of those figures. The sessional-only fee is €5,000 and the minimum amount any service will get in core funding this year is €14,000. It has gone from €8,000 to €14,000, a 73% increase. We have made those changes because we have grown the pot each year. It was €206 million when it was originally budgeted for, in its second year it grew to €287 million and this year, it will be €331 million. I will be doing battle in the next couple of weeks in terms of trying to grow it for year four. I always told the sector I would seek to continue to grow it.

As regards listening to the concerns that have been raised, another key change in year three is the ability to apply for a fee increase, recognising that when fees were frozen in 2022 at 2021 levels, some services had increased them in 2020, others in 2019 or 2018 and some in 2015 or 2014. There is an inequity there. We recognise that and it is why we are making this change. It may not satisfy all services this year but it is again, I believe, us recognising that core funding, though it is a good approach, is trying to meet the needs of large services. I point to the fact that many Senators have spoken to the concerns of the small services and we have also had the concerns of the biggest provider in the country. We are trying to create a system that has fairness built in but also supports the diversity of services. I have always said I want to support that diversity. Those are the steps in progress that we have been able to make.

In terms of the issue of capacity, the recommendations Senator Currie is speaking to and the work that has been ongoing within my Department, I will speak to that higher level first. At that high level, we have created the supply management unit in my Department, with the idea of forward planning for early years. I know a point was made about how it has not always worked in other areas of the education system. We have the advantage of having people in every local authority, the city and county childcare committee, CCC, who we can work with and who have that on-the-ground knowledge. The Department of Education does not really have that. The Department of Education does not really have people in place in that way. It may have them in the context of the ETBs, but they are at a higher level. We will be working closely with the CCCs and looking to influence those development plans and making sure there is an element there. That speaks to the second recommendation Senator Currie put forward. We are doing a piece of work in geo-mapping, looking at the census and where there are nought- to one-year-olds and one- to two-year-olds and overlaying that with where childcare is developed and provided for at the moment.

On the wider planning issues in terms of the planning system, there is a significant piece of work under way between my Department and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to review the 2001 planning guidelines, which Senator Currie has set out in recommendation No. 1. Some 18 months or two years ago I had a really good meeting with planners from a number of local authorities, including Fingal and a couple of other rural and urban local authorities, to hear their cases of where the planning guidelines were not delivering. There is a big piece of work, the Planning and Development Bill, and this House has been working on it this week. We have set up an interdepartmental group between our Department and the Department of housing and we have brought in the Department of Education to try to have a better overview and look at the application and the suitability of those planning guidelines in the context of current policy and the demand we know exists. The Department of housing will send to local authorities a detailed survey looking to gain direct insight into the challenges and the problems they see with the planning guidelines at the moment. That will inform the reform of those guidelines.

One of the elements we set out when we responded to Partnership for the Public Good and the expert group was looking at the idea of public provision and whether there should be some element of it and, in particular, the idea of the State using capital funding to acquire shell buildings. It might be a lease-back model, as Senator Currie suggests in recommendation 4. It might be a direct provision to the community as well. We should be open.