Campaigners are urging the Government to spend an additional €2bn a year to fund more childcare, and have suggested taking money from Child Benefit to pay for the scheme.

Start Strong, a lobby group which advocates for childcare, together with Barnardos, the National Women’s Council and lone parent group One Family, made the call at a seminar yesterday, The Irish Times reports.

Start Strong calls for the introduction of a second free pre-school year and regulation for all paid childminders by next year.

Over the next six years afterschool care should be provided as well as training for all childcare staff. There should be paid parental leave for a child’s first year, up from the current six months, and subsidies for all parents for childcare costs.

By 2020 a high-quality, well-regulated childcare system should be in place run by a professional workforce, the group says.

They call for an increase in income tax, capital gains tax and capital acquisitions tax to pay for the move. It also suggested that abolishing tax relief on property and pension reliefs could yield another €2 billion.

Toby Wolfe, acting director of Start Strong, accepted that the €2 billion called for was a lot of money but claimed that it was “an investment that we know yields large economic returns”.

The experience of countries like Sweden which have universal, State-subsidised child care and strong economies was cited. No evidence was provided to show this is causation rather than correlation.

Money could also be diverted into the system from child benefit, which the State spent €2 billion on last year, Micheál Collins of the Nevin Economic Research Institute, said. “The return the State gets back will pay for itself over time”.
 
Fergus Finlay, chief executive of Barnardos told the seminar that Scandanavian countries with strong childcare also happened to have strong economies.

“The Scandinavian countries have weathered the storm of the recession and it’s not a coincidence that they have invested in childcare,” he said.

The seminar also heard that early childcare improved children’s numeracy and literacy, and made them more sociable and healthier and that children from poorer backgrounds benefited the most with longer attendance in school.

However research showing that children benefit from early child care, such as the ‘Effective Pre-School and Primary Education 3-11 Project’ is based on children from very disadvantaged backgrounds.