Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 22 October 2019
62. Deputy Kathleen Funchion asked the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs the reason for delays in Pobal payments or shortfalls in payments to early years service providers since August 2019; the reason there has been no correspondence or notifications made by Pobal with the service providers affected in advance of the delays; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [43276/19]
Amharc ar fhreagraThis question relates to childcare and early years services and the delays or shortfalls in Pobal payments to them since August of this year and why there has been no correspondence or notifications made by Pobal with the services affected.
Pobal administers both the early childhood care and education, ECCE, and targeted early learning and care and school age childcare programmes on behalf of my Department.
There have been no delays to ECCE standard capitation programme payments. All eligible ECCE standard capitation has been paid out in line with the payment schedule, published as part of programme readiness in August. The first preliminary payment was made on 23 August. This payment was made to all services that had entered into a funding agreement by the published deadline.
On the ECCE higher capitation payments, Pobal announced to services prior to the beginning of the 2019-20 programme year in September that it would begin processing applications in October. Regrettably, this start date was later than had been indicated the previous year. Pobal has begun processing applications in October, in line with the announced schedule. Pobal is currently processing a large volume of applications and is working to approve applications and release funding as soon as possible.
There have also been some issues with the community childcare subvention plus programme, CCSP, whereby the processing of registrations has been taking longer than usual to complete, owing to the large volumes of CCSP registrations being made following the merging of this programme with the CCS programme. As of 17 October last, Pobal had registered 30,000 children to the programme, compared to 23,000 at a similar point in last year’s process. In addition, there has also been a significant block of work for Pobal associated with a large volume of re-registrations of children due to corrections that needed to be made to their registrations following compliance visits.
Notwithstanding these issues, which Pobal is working hard to mitigate, I stress that the majority of registrations for the targeted schemes and the standard capitation levels for ECCE are being turned around within Pobal’s 15 day target for this activity.
There has to be some misinformation somewhere regarding this because that is not the case for many services in Kilkenny which have contacted me to say that they are dipping into their own money to try to pay staff wages because there has been such a delay. The problem that they have is that nobody is talking to them. They have to chase down Pobal, and nobody is coming to them to say that there is an issue or problem or to furnish a preliminary payment to keep the services going. That is not what is happening on the ground. On 4 October, a service in Kilkenny was given a preliminary payment. That payment was then taken back from its bank account. Some misinformation is definitely going on. It is not acceptable that services have to try to pay out of their own funds, which many would not have, to keep the service going. Even if they did, that is not the point. It is totally unacceptable. Pobal may say there are some glitches, but it is definitely not dealing with them for these services. If the Minister wants, I can forward the particular details of these services to her. A number in Kilkenny have been left short of money with absolutely no answers.
I thank the Deputy and, of course, I would very much like to have that information. I accept and take at face value what she has identified. My understanding of the initial communication is that Pobal made an announcement to service providers through the Pobal PIP system on 19 August, informing them that applications would not begin to be processed until October. Officials in my Department are in close contact with their colleagues in Pobal on the processing by these timelines. That is the first issue. The second issue is Pobal went through the regular channels where it communicates with the services but that some services are out of pocket and have not been communicated with. I will have to take that information from the Deputy and look into that.
I will forward this information to the Minister afterwards. The issue relating to the service providers is not the delays. Everyone in life understands that there are delays and glitches with systems. The issue is the lack of communication and preliminary payments being made and then taken back, with no explanation. That seems to be the big issue for the services. I will forward this information to the Minister to see if we can get to the bottom of this for the services. I thank her and the Ceann Comhairle.
