Debate contribution: Universal, Affordable Child-centred Childcare

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Givan on 18 November 2024.

MLA

Mr Paul Givan

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

18 November 2024

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Universal, Affordable Child-centred Childcare

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4656624

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I welcome the opportunity to respond to the debate on a motion that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of children and families across Northern Ireland. I very much welcome the motion before us, because it brings into focus something that is important to many people in Northern Ireland. I absolutely recognise the importance of quality early learning and childcare provision in giving children the best start in life and supporting parents, particularly women, to enter or remain in the workforce. I take the opportunity to acknowledge the quality early years and childcare services that exist across Northern Ireland. When I took up this post in February, I said that I would bring forward an early learning and childcare strategy that would support child development and make childcare more affordable and accessible in order to enable parents to work, and I remain fully committed to doing so. However, strategies take time to develop and implement, and I realised that action was needed immediately. That is why I secured an additional £25 million of Executive funding in May to implement a package of measures in this financial year. That investment is making a real difference to thousands of children and families across Northern Ireland. I welcome the Finance Minister's support in the form of that £25 million. I also welcome the Ulster Unionist Party's support for that being included. I note the comments made by my colleague in Lagan Valley, the Alliance Member: "This has been decades in the making. We have been waiting for years for this to happen". I thank Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionist Party for supporting the £25 million allocation to this budget. Members may wish to look closer to home when it comes to what priority was given in the Executive to this issue. A strategy, while necessary to provide a blueprint for the longer term, would not have delivered the immediate benefits that were, I knew, urgently needed.

Let me summarise what has been achieved. First, I implemented a Northern Ireland childcare subsidy scheme that provides eligible parents with a 15% reduction to their childcare bills. The uptake for the scheme has exceeded our expectations. To date, nearly 13,300 children and 1,550 providers have registered, with reductions already having been made to bills since September. The mover of the motion indicated that £1 million of savings had been provided, but that is £1 million a month. In the first two months alone, the scheme saved parents £2 million on their childcare costs, with a further £2 million having been saved through the tax-free childcare scheme. The combined effect of those schemes has been to save working parents in Northern Ireland over £4 million in the past two months alone. By way of example, a parent with two eligible children could save up to £668 on their monthly childcare costs, which is a reduction of 32%. Over a 12-month period, that represents a total saving of £8,000. That is a significant step forward from where we were just nine months ago when I last stood here to respond to a similar motion on 12 February. Having listened to parents and providers, it is my intention to bid for funding to sustain the scheme beyond the end of March 2025 until a longer-term strategy is in place. I appreciate that there have been calls to increase the subsidy and to extend it to others, such as parents with school-age children. I will consider those options over the coming months. With there being a limited budget, the focus this year has rightly been on working parents with children who are below primary-school age. That group typically faces the highest costs due to its reliance on longer childcare hours. The scheme also targets parents — they are mainly mothers — who are at the stage of making decisions about whether to return to work following maternity leave. Childcare costs can be a significant barrier to that. The scheme is set up in such a way that means that we could easily expand it if there were a case to do so and if the Executive made the required funding available. I will give that careful consideration. That gets to Mr Durkan's question of, "If the Minister had more, would he do more?". Absolutely I would do more. When intervening on his colleague, Mr O'Toole made a comment about our needing to make more than one intervention. A second area of progress that I will highlight is our investment in a range of core early years programmes. Those that have benefited include Sure Start; the Pathway fund; Toybox; non-statutory preschool providers; the Irish-medium preschool support service; PlayBoard; and the Bookstart Baby programme. That investment has helped to secure vital services for some of the most vulnerable and has enabled those programmes to provide pay rises to their staff while maintaining and, in some cases, expanding front-line services.

I would like to highlight one more area, and then I will give way. As well as supporting Department of Education early years programmes, we have been able to boost some programmes that other Departments administer. Those include the Department of Health's early years and childcare provision for children with additional needs and disabilities, and support for the expansion of its approved home childcare scheme. Funding has also been provided to the Department for Communities to train more childminders through labour market partnerships. A third area of progress relates to the standardisation of the preschool education programme. The Education Authority is well advanced in identifying the first preschool settings that will transition to delivering at least 22 and a half hours of preschool education per week from September 2025. Three lists, with a total of 107 potential candidates, have been published on my Department's website and are undergoing consultation. Final announcements on the first settings that are due to transition are planned to be made before the end of the calendar year. Far from making only one intervention, I have made many interventions. I will give way to the Member.

Sure Start can be assured of the priority that I have given to it in the strategy. Of course, the Executive want to do multi-year Budgets, and that would provide greater security. However, given that I have made it a priority to support Sure Start, we were able to give permanency to just over 20 areas where it operates that had been extended temporarily. I absolutely recognise the importance of Sure Start. The motion calls for financial support for childcare providers. The package of measures announced in May included proposals to establish a targeted business support scheme for providers that were in significant financial difficulty and in areas where demand for childcare exceeded supply. I have been engaging with the Department for the Economy on that area. The Minister wrote to me on 1 August, offering to lead on a scoping exercise in conjunction with Invest NI, the Department of Health, the Department of Education and wider stakeholders to develop a clear picture of the business support requirements in the childcare sector. The Department for the Economy is leading on that, and I look forward to further engagement. Finally, I turn to the work being done to collect data that is necessary to inform policy development, and this speaks to the issue of informed policy. Whilst there is a lot of anecdotal evidence on childcare costs and usage, we have very little robust statistical data that is representative of the population as a whole, and that has hampered policy development. Core to that is data being collected from providers through the childcare subsidy scheme. Based on the data collected since September relating to 13,000 children who are currently registered, we know that the average net cost for families per child is about £400 per month. Some families are paying more, some less, but, for the first time, we have reliable data to estimate the average net cost. We also know that about 90% of children accessing the subsidy incur childcare costs of less than £700 per child per month after accounting for the financial support from the subsidy scheme. All of that is helping to provide us with a clear picture. The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) commissioned a survey, which issued on 4 November. The findings and data that are being collected will help to inform the strategy that I am going to take forward. It is very much my intention to have that work completed by the autumn of 2025 so that we have a comprehensive strategy. However, it is the immediate action taken by the Executive, and by me as Education Minister, that is showing a tangible benefit for hard-working families, and I am determined to continue to build on the progress that we have made.

1,475 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:31 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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