CAP CRECHE FEES OR GET NO FUNDS
Childcare sector fury after wage ultimatum
TENSION is mounting in the childcare sector, as it emerged that any providers who increased their charges last month will not be eligible for a share of a new €69million wage fund.
The fund, announced in the Budget and subsequently explained in greater detail to sector representatives yesterday, is to be conditional upon creches not raising their fees to parents.
It will not be paid over until September next year, and will give the sector’s 26,000 workers around €50 extra per week, in a bid to halt the flight of staff from childcare services. Elaine Dunne, chair of the Federation of Early Childhood Providers, said: ‘Providers
‘Providers are up in arms about it’
are up in arms about the capping of fees because we don’t yet know how it will really work.
‘It’s going to take seven months for them [the Department of Children] to figure out how this money will come to us. In the meantime, there is going to be consultation with us, which is positive, to see how we feel about the changes.’
She said the Budget had done nothing to help sole traders, who were chronically underfunded but who accounted for many rural childcare services.
And she said the €69million should not be linked to a fee freeze, as that would not allow providers to meet rising costs of electricity, phones, heating, water and diesel for school pick-ups.
Darragh Whelan, of the Ibec trade association Childhood Services Ireland, said: ‘The details announced by the Department of Children could disqualify a lot of childcare providers from the additional funding announced in the Budget.
‘Providers are also very concerned that the fee freeze does not take into account growing inflation or rising costs in the sector. Many haven’t increased their fees since the pandemic began, and we are in a very different world now.’
The association had advocated for increases in investment in universal childcare subsidies to lower the cost of childcare for parents, as well as higher Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) rates
and Programme Support Payments for the National Childcare Scheme (NCS) to aid providers.
Mr Whelan added: ‘Budget 2022 included significant investment in the sector but there are a number of issues with the Department of Children’s announcement, and we now look forward to once again working closely and constructively with Minister Roderic O’Gorman and his officials to resolve them.’
Children’s Minister Mr O’Gorman acknowledged yesterday that there were ‘mixed’ views among the sector on the Budget plans.
He said he recognised that the fees paid by parents were too high, and that he was committed to doing everything he could as minister to ensure that they fell.
He said that while any reductions in fees this year would be ‘modest’, the new investment had ‘created a mechanism’ to continue to reduce them in future years.
Mr O’Gorman said that if a family has an eight-year-old child using after-school childcare for three hours a day, five days a week, they should now save €30 a month or €360 a year. This is as a result of the expansion of the NCS in the Budget from children aged up to three to those up to 15.
He said parents of a child doing ECCE and aftercare should now save €60 a month during term time and €90 a month at other times, totalling around €885 a year.
Mr O’Gorman admitted Ireland was significantly behind in the levels of investment it provided in childcare compared to European counterparts.
However, he said he was determined that when that level of investment in NCS was increased in future years, it would not be ‘eaten’ by fee increases. ‘Because that’s what we’ve seen in the past governments: [former children’s minister] Katherine Zappone put very substantial amounts of money into the NCS but it disappeared in a fee increase,’ he said.
‘And that’s because many providers do have genuine sustainability issues. So we’re putting the money into providers primarily to allow them to pay proper wages to childcare professionals in exchange for this commitment not to increase fees. Future investments into the NCS and investment we’re putting in this year will actually be felt in parents’ pockets.’