2023-07-28 17:07:08
Touching family allowances or social benefits is a tricky subject. We remember mayors having seen the thunderbolts fall on their heads for wanting cut social assistance to families of children responsible for degradation in their communes. More recently, the Reconquête!, RN and LR parties had suggested this solution to empower families whose children participated in the riots that followed Nahel’s death. At the same time, the right struggles just as much to enforce a written rule: stop the systematic payment of CAF to the parents of foster children.
This may seem illogical at first glance, but in fact, most parents of children placed with the Childhood Social Assistance (ASE) continue to receive social benefits for a filiation for which they no longer assume responsibility. financial charge. A common practice, left to the discretion of the family court judge, and provided for by the regulations. Indeed, the payment of family allowances is governed by the Social Security Code, to article L521-2, which specifies that “the allowances are paid to the person who assumes, under whatever conditions, the effective and permanent charge of the beneficiary child”. This sentence appeared at the top of the first version of the text, adopted in 1985, and it is still in force today, even if the article has since been greatly enriched.
A decision that is up to the judge alone
It is one of these enrichments that poses a problem for politicians. For a child placed, it is certainly provided that the allowances due to the family for this child are paid to the ASE. The article then specifies that “the judge may decide, ex officio or on referral from the President of the General Council, […] to maintain the payment of family allowances”. The reservation is that the parents participate “in the moral or material care of the child” or that this can “facilitate the return of the child to his home”. Already in 2013, Senator LR Catherine Deroche lamented that the practice “ignores the spirit of the law” since “the exception has become the rule”. In his report submitted to the Senate, she insisted that the share of the CAF paid to the parents should not exceed 35% of the amount due for the placed child. And to attribute this share to the parents, the judge had to take into account a report drawn up by the ASE. These changes have not been added to the text.
Much later, in December 2022, Antoine Vermorel-Marques, another elected LR, deputy this time, took up the subject. He has drafted a bill starting from the same observation as the senator. But he wishes to go further, removing the judge for family affairs from the loop, by enshrining in the law “the systematic payment of family allowances inherent in a child placed in the service of social assistance for children”. At the time, according to our colleagues from the country, this text had challenged the Secretary of State for Children, Charlotte Caubel. But again, it hadn’t come to anything concrete. According to our information, this bill was never mentioned during the session of the Assembly.
Administrative laziness and winning appeals
So why does this get stuck and why has the exception become the rule? “The argument often put forward by judges is the maintenance of the link”, explains to 20 Minutes a social worker, experienced in the operation of the ASE, who prefers to remain anonymous. But this is not the only reason: “Today, the families of children in care who see their allowances suspended do not hesitate to hire a lawyer to appeal. And in the cases that I know of, they win each time,” continues the social worker. The latter also affirms that administratively speaking, it is less complicated to leave things as they are. “To be honest, it’s not something that is put in place very easily,” recognizes Maître Mathilde Tomaszek, a lawyer specializing in family law. She has never had to deal with this kind of request.
For Jenny Lamy, a lawyer specializing in appeals against the abusive placements of children, this is a non-issue. “Wanting to scratch on this side is incomprehensible and it would not change the ASE’s budget,” she insists. In the numbers, it’s not wrong. For a couple in the lowest income bracket, the CAF pays 142 euros for two children. Gold, saccording to INSEE, in 2023, the total gross investment expenditure within the framework of social assistance for children (ASE) exceeded seven billion euros for approximately 200,000 children. And when the deputy Antoine Vermorel-Marques denounced the payment of a kind of “RSA bis” to the parents of children in care, Maître Lamy shouted a halt to clichés: “Perhaps if we take that away from the parents, they will not have no longer the means to maintain the link, to travel to see their children, to make small gifts, insists the lawyer. All these bills do not take into account the fact that part of the population is sometimes in an extremely difficult financial situation”.
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