Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Independent)
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361. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs if his attention has been drawn to correspondence from the Association of Childhood Professionals requesting a meeting to address its serious concerns regarding obstacles in various Departments which hinder the provision of quality early years services; and if he will accede to this request. [46321/14]

James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael)
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As the correspondence in question relates to matters for which I have responsibility, the Taoiseach has passed the letter to me for response. I met with the group in question on 5th November last and am aware of their concerns.

I am aware of the sustainability issues faced by early years services and, over the coming period, I will be examining the options for future childcare investment.

Annual funding in the region of €260 million is provided to the childcare sector to support a number of childcare programmes that are implemented by this Department. These programmes include the Community Childcare Subvention (CCS) programme, the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme and a number of labour activation initiatives under the Training and Employment Childcare (TEC) programmes. These programmes, in particular the Early Childhood Care and Education programme, provide a guaranteed source of income to participating services and, given that many parents would otherwise not be able to avail of pre-school care and education for their children, the funding has ensured that many childcare services, both commercial and community, have the resources to continue to operate.

Despite the budgetary situation that prevailed in recent years the Government has maintained the funding necessary to support these childcare programmes and has introduced new initiatives to meet the changing circumstances, particularly in regard to the improved employment opportunities in the economy. As additional funding becomes available, I would hope that the capitation rates for all programmes could be increased to provide further support.

I acknowledge that over previous years there have been delays in payments made to service providers, which may have resulted in further financial pressures at given times. This has been due to the fact that the programmes have undergone considerable changes to meet the changing childcare needs. New programmes to support training and labour market activation measures have been introduced and, because these programmes have been administered separately and manually on separate databases, there have been issues in relation to duplication of effort and data exchange.

In recognition of these issues my Department and Pobal are in the process of introducing a new management platform for the early years programmes – the Programmes Implementation Platform (PIP). This new online system will streamline the administrative processes across childcare funding programmes. It is envisaged that PIP will reduce paper-based exchanges of information between parties by the provision of online forms for data entry and integrated document management capabilities. This in turn will shorten the lead in time for key programme milestones, for example, the contracting period, initial payments, funding approval and subsequent payments.

The introduction of new ICT infrastructure tends to result in minor technical issues emerging and PIP, a complex system, has been no exception, resulting in service providers experiencing delays in registering children on the system. Advance payments were made to service providers for both the ECCE and CCS programmes.

On the 15th of October this year, while over 30,000 children had already been registered on the system for the ECCE programme, my Department took the decision to issue a further advance payment to service providers to allow for those service providers who had experienced delays or difficulties in completing their registrations. While acknowledging the inconvenience for service providers not receiving accurate balancing payments as early as usual, the decision was taken to ensure that all service providers received sufficient advance funding to honour any financial commitments, rather than to delay all payments until the PIP technical issues were resolved. Providers were entitled to apply for an additional advance payment if they had significantly more children registered on the programme than last year.

ECCE balancing payments covering the period up to 23rd January 2015 are being made this week. These payments are based on the actual numbers of children registered and approved for participation in the programme.

The PIP technical issues also affected payments under the Training and Employment Childcare programmes. These issues have also been resolved and there should be no delays in payments in the future.

CCS Registrations on the PIP system are being launched this week. CCS service providers have also received a further preliminary payment, covering the period up to the end of January 2015, while CCS eligibility criteria is validated.

The new ICT system is expected to further streamline the payment process for all of the childcare support programmes implemented by this Department. I can assure the Deputy that both my Department and Pobal are working to address issues as PIP develops, and I am confident that once the system is fully operational it will prove to be extremely beneficial and efficient and will significantly improve the situation for service providers.