Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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1165. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs the reason for the delay in delivering the funding to six child care projects in County Cork promised by her Department six months ago. [34312/17]

Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent)
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The Department has made €1m in funding available to services that identified themselves as potentially being impacted by staff eligibility changes within the 2016 Regulations. This funding will ensure that said regulatory changes do not hinder service delivery or the availability of childcare places.

The principles, procedures and management of funding provided from public money are set out in the Public Spending Code. The Public Spending Code consolidates and updates existing appraisal and evaluation requirements and guidelines, with the aim of promoting value for money and ensuring the optimal use of limited exchequer resources. In keeping with these aims and in order to avail of the funding specified, each of the participating providers was invited to engage in a proscribed and standardised application process. The Department remains committed to assessing all complete applications equally, without prejudice to additional communications or representations made.

As a part of the application process, services were required to furnish the Department with certain documentation and information; allowing for an assessment appropriate to the payment of any public funds. Such documentation was designed so as not to add an administrative burden to the Early Years providers. Additionally, the Department provided a checklist of these requirements in order to provide services with further support and clarity regarding the materials necessary to progress their application. The checklist was distributed by the City/County Childcare Committees (CCCs) to early years providers in their respective areas, in respect of the issue at hand, this checklist was provided to Cork CCC on 4 April 2017.

The speed of the application and payment process remains dependent on the services in question submitting appropriate documentation, as outlined within the checklist of requirements. Furthermore, to ensure the best possible outcome for each service, once the documentation is received it is subsequently reviewed for consistency. At this stage, if an issue arises in terms of the clarity of information provided, additional information may be sought from the individual groups through the respective CCC. Once this has occurred, the Strand B Submission is finalised. To date, six services from across the country have fully returned the necessary documentation and information in respect of their application for CE Sustainability funding, and their Strand B Submissions have been finalised. Of these six services, the Department has approved one and expects to finalise its assessment of the remaining five imminently. However, of the six Cork-based services to have applied for CE sustainability funding, none have fully returned the required information and documentation as at time of writing (11/07/2017). The Department is unable to fairly assess partial applications, and therefore the primary delay in the provision of the payment to these services remains the absence of documentation previously requested.

The Department has delegated the collation of relevant documentation and information in respect of the application process to the local CCCs. Therefore, the first point of contact for any further queries on this matter should be with the Cork City Childcare Committee. However, the Department and the CCCs remain available to provide any assistance they can in respect of the application process, and will be directly in contact with the services in question with regards to re-iterating the requirements of the application process.

The Department views as an ongoing priority both the assessment of completed applications and the subsequent payment of providers who have engaged-with and satisfied this assessment process.