Ireland needs 40,000 more child-care places in the next 10 years if expected increases in the labour force are to occur, the employers' organisation, IBEC, said yesterday.
Already, it says, up to 70 per cent of employers are facing recruitment difficulties. This is at a time when many women are prevented from getting back to work or are leaving their jobs because of a lack of affordable, quality childcare facilities.
The formal child-care sector cannot supply the 40,000 extra places needed in the next decade to any significant extent because it is becoming increasingly unprofitable to provide such services, says a report published by IBEC yesterday.
The alternative is unregulated child care in the black economy, it says, adding that more than 30,000 child-minders are estimated to be operating in this way.
Costs arising from regulation, staffing, high rents and planning problems are among the factors preventing the expansion of formal child care, it says.
It calls on the Government to adopt a range of measures to boost child-care provision. These include:
A new tax-free allowance of £3,500 per child in registered child care.
Special capital allowances for formal child-care providers.
Employees to be exempt from any benefit-in-kind tax for availing of subsidised child-care places.
FAS to develop child-care training programmes.
Greater use of schools to provide pre-school and after-school care.
Businesses which provide child care, whether as an investment or as a service for employees, should be given tax relief.
More use should be made of teleworking, to enable parents to work from home.
If affordable, quality child care was available, IBEC estimates at least 50,000 more Irish women would be at work.
Current child-care costs mean that in a family of two adults and two children where the father has a gross income from his job of £15,000 a year, the mother, if she returned to employment, would have to earn £15,103 to leave the family £50 a week better off.
IBEC is involved, with the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, in pilot child-care projects in selected areas.