Families paying some of the country’s highest childcare fees will see costs reduced in September after the Department of Children confirmed new caps on what providers can charge.
The new ceilings should mean no parents pay more than €295 per week for a child attending a service participating in the Government’s Core Funding scheme for between 40 and 50 hours a week. That figure will, in most cases, reduce to €198.70 after other supports are factored in. The caps vary according to the number of hours involved.
The reductions, however, will only affect those parents whose children attend the most expensive services in receipt of Core Funding, with about 10 per cent of the almost 4,500 Government-supported providers charging at least one type of fee that will have to be reduced.
In the majority of cases the savings involved will amount to around €100 a month but in a small number, the figure is far higher at €188 per week or €9,776 per year, according to department figures.
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The imposition of fee caps from September on service providers in receipt of Core Funding had been scheduled for some time, but they had only previously applied to services that signed up to Core Funding for the first time.
The department said on Thursday that the new caps would bring the gross fees paid by parents at more expensive services closer to the national average cost of €197 per week.
At the announcement, Minister for Children Norma Foley acknowledged the Government still has considerable ground to cover to honour commitments that costs to parents will be cut to €200 per month.
She said this would be done during the life of the Government, but said it was too early to indicate what scale of reductions might be funded in this year’s budget. The childcare sector funding year runs from September to August and most of the big funding changes set to take effect later this year were announced before the current Government was elected.
“The programme for government has a very clear commitment around the €200 and that is our absolute goal,” she said. “I’ve been very clear that we will do that over the lifetime of this Government. It will be incremental, and we’re starting at the very top where there are extraordinarily high costs to parents, and we’re beginning to bring that down.”
Ms Foley said Core Funding would increase from €331 million in the current year to at least €350 million in the year from September with up to €45 million in additional funding to support pay in the sector which is widely seen as a barrier to the provision of additional places and services due to the difficulty in attracting and retaining staff. Minimum rates in the sector are only fractionally above the minimum wage.
Talks between employer groups and unions on a new sector-wide agreement on minimum rates are ongoing and while progress is said to have been made, it is not clear that any new deal would be in place by September.
If it is not, or the increases agreed are too small, some of the €45 million will be retained by the department.
“This funding is welcome, but the scale of it has to be reflected in the pay of staff in the sector,” said Darragh O’Connor of Siptu. “Otherwise, it will be impossible for anyone to go back and make the case for similar supports in future years.”
Karen Clince, chief executive at one of the country’s largest providers, Tigers, welcomed the increased levels of Core Funding to be provided. But she said “it doesn’t go nearly far enough to address the horrific staffing we find ourselves in. We need more focus on pay and conditions rather than just vote-winning affordability.”
