Police cost recovery bill another funding cut

05 November, 2014

Police cost recovery bill another funding cut for early childhood centres

The Early Childhood Council has called The Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill ‘the most recent of many cunning little cuts that are draining early childhood services of resources and quality’.

The Bill, if passed into law, would allow Police to charge for vetting staff in early childhood and other public services.

Early Childhood Council CEO Peter Reynolds said today (05 November) the Bill was ‘so absurd it lampoons itself’.

‘It argues Police should be able to recover costs for services “where there is a degree of private benefit to the user”.

‘It then excuses the big profit-making entertainment events from payment, and targets only services Police provide to ensure early childhood centres and other social services are not populated by paedophiles and others of danger to children.’

The idea we should be compelled to pay the Police to protect children would be funny in television satire, but it wasn’t funny in Parliament, Mr Reynolds said.

He said the early childhood sector regarded ‘with immense scepticism’ Police Minister Tolley’s comment that most organisations would be able to absorb the costs of paying for Police services.

‘Early childhood services will not be allowed to function without vetting of staff, there will be just one provider of this vetting, and we all know what happens to prices in such circumstance.

‘It is our expectation the costs will start low, then rise slowly. Not in one big bang likely to attract news media attention, but relentlessly… until they are substantial.’

The ECE sector had bitter experience of the extent to which the current Government had mastered the cutting of per-child funding, ‘one little step at a time, to avoid both media coverage and the scrutiny of voting parents’, Mr Reynolds said.

The result was four years of ‘funding cuts by stealth’. Cuts that had increased fees for families, decimated professional development for teachers, replaced qualified staff with the unqualified, and cut teacher-child ratios.

The Government had been remarkably skilful in managing to invisibility the quality cuts they had engineered, Mr Reynolds said.

‘And I am sure, if the current Bill passes, they will do a similarly thorough job of engineering ‘price increases by stealth’ for vetting fees.

Mr Reynolds said, beginning with the 2010 Government Budget early childhood centres had lost:

• Funding for the 80 to 99% and 100% qualified teacher funding bands (which stripped tens of thousands of dollars from centre budgets);

• The Support Grant that funded training for Provisionally Registered Teachers;

• Revenue due to the increase in GST from 12.5% to 15%;

• Revenue due to the removal of the childcare tax subsidy;

• The equalisation top-up that funded pay parity with kindergarten teachers (which means teachers working in childcare centres are now paid less than those working in kindergartens to do the same job); and

• Universal subsidies that keep up with inflation (which means the real value of this money is falling with each Government Budget).

Mr Reynolds said, from an early childhood education point of view, it was ‘as if there are two realities: the reality in childcare services; and the reality of the ministerial news release’. And if The Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill were passed, he expected vetting fees ‘to rise relentlessly, and without end’.

The Early Childhood Council is New Zealand’s largest representative body of licensed early childhood centres.

© Scoop Media