Aid for existing creches and pre-school facilities struggling to meet the standards laid down in the 1996 Childcare Regulations is proposed in the childcare section of the report.
But it warned that childcare was a difficult policy question to address, "because it impinges on a wide variety of issues relating to child welfare, equal opportunities, the role of the family and so on".
It criticised the involvement of a large number of Government Departments in childcare initiatives and said this had resulted in fragmentation of responsibility for childcare policy.
The council favours higher child benefit (Children's Allowances) as a way of enabling people to pay for childcare but pointed to a difficulty with this. On the one hand it favoured taxing child benefit as this would make it feasible for the gross amount to be increased. That, in turn, would help to alleviate poverty among parents whose income was so low they were outside the tax net.
But for people who were in the tax net, the gross child benefit would have to be very high if what was left after tax was to make a meaningful contribution towards childcare costs.
Therefore, it said, other measures might have to be introduced to make childcare affordable, although it did not say what these might be.
It also referred to the situation of "the significant minority of people who have to juggle the competing demands of work and other care responsibilities". For these, it said , it supported "the introduction of other types of family leave arrangements that would enable employees to balance work and home responsibilities".
"On the supply side, the council supports continued capital allowances for expenditure on workplace-based childcare facilities but also calls for measures to aid existing independent registered facilities to meet the requirements of the 1996 Childcare Regulations," it said.