The PCP insisted this Friday free childcare for all childrenregardless of age, and urged the Government to guarantee the creation of another 100,000 places until 2026, to meet the needs of families.
“We propose that the free [das creches] it already covers all children who attend day care, regardless of their age,” said Margarida Botelho, from the PCP Central Committee Secretariat, during a press conference at the party’s headquarters in Lisbon.
The communist leader advocated that free access for all children born after September 1, 2021 be “an important step—that “it was not included in the PS program and that it only imposed the insistence of the PCP”—, but it is necessary to advance “faster”.
The PCP appealed to the Government of António Costa create 100,000 more jobs by 2026an investment that must be insured by the State, Margarida Botelho argued, “to build or rehabilitate the necessary buildings, establishing priorities according to the most needy areas and admitting equivalent solutions until the network is completed.”
The PS presented from the beginning”excuses to limit the number of children coveredeither gradually by income brackets, or now by age”, argued the member of the communist secretariat.
He added: “Free childcare is a pressing need for children and their families, but they are not the only ones.”
Margarida Botelho also considered that investment in the public nursery network, which has long been one of the PCP’s banners, must be accompanied by better wages and working conditions.
“Households with dependent children, especially single parents, are most at risk of poverty. Unemployment, precariousness, low wages, extremely high costs with housing, with nurseries, with the necessary school supplies for the start of the school year, with uncontrolled work schedules. […]they are making life unbearable for families,” he concluded.
Source: Observadora
