Lisbon, July 22, 2024 (Lusa) - The Court of Auditors concluded on Monday that the Social Security Institute does not know the number of children on the waiting list for a place in a crèche, which hinders the evaluation of the measure and the creation of new policies.
The Court of Auditors carried out an audit of the management and control system of cooperation agreements, focusing on daycare, and concluded, on the one hand, that between 2019 and 2022, the number of children enrolled in daycare increased by almost 3% and expenditure by more than 40%.
On the other hand, ‘the Social Security Institute is unaware of the number of children on the waiting list, which jeopardises the formulation and evaluation of public policies for the children's area,’ the Court of Auditors said.
According to the Court of Auditors, the reason for the increase in the number of children enrolled, along with the number of cooperation agreements, has to do ‘fundamentally’ with the increase in the value of the co-payment paid to Private Social Solidarity Institutions (IPSS) and the creation of the ‘Creche Feliz’ measure, which brought free childcare to children born on or after 1 September 2021, in addition to those in the 1st and 2nd income brackets.
‘Social Security expenditure on the 1,864 cooperation agreements signed with 1,538 IPSS in the area of daycare was €348.8 million in 2022, €100.8 million (40.7%) more than in 2019, while the number of children covered (76,811) increased by 2.9% (2,166),’ the Court of Auditors said.
It added that in 2022, the 119,616 places in crèches made it possible to cover around half (50.4%) of children under the age of three, which was 237,470, ‘which shows an improvement of approximately 3.1 percentage points compared to 2019’.
The Court of Auditors pointed out that with the extension of free childcare, there has been a ‘significant increase in demand for the service and, consequently, in waiting lists’.
‘However, the Social Security Institute is unaware of the number of children on waiting lists in crèches, which hinders the quantification of needs in terms of supply of the social response, the definition of objectives for coverage rates and the control of compliance with admission and prioritisation criteria,’ the report said.
According to the Court of Auditors, at the beginning of the free daycare measure, 20,473 children were covered, which represented around 27.2% of children attending a daycare centre under the cooperation agreements. In 2022, that number rose by more than 100% to 48,946 children, costing €40.7 million.
In 2023, another 12,301 children will benefit from free places thanks to the fact that the measure, which initially started only with the social sector, will now cover facilities in the private and for-profit networks, as well as in the social network without a cooperation agreement, as was the case with the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa.
The Court of Auditors audit also concluded that not all IPSS have submitted their accounts to the Ministry of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security, pointing out that of the 4,996 in existence, ‘only 3,885 have submitted their accounts’.
It also says that ‘the control of cooperation agreements is hampered by the lack of interoperability between the information subsystem Budget and Accounts of Private Institutions of Social Solidarity (OCIP) and the subsystem for the management and control of cooperation agreements (SISS/COOP).
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