Will the initiative survive the joint joint commission which is being held this Wednesday evening on the amending finance bill, the first reading of which has just ended with the vote on the text in the Senate? During his passage before the upper house, the Republicans unraveled the government’s exceptional back-to-school aid system.
The initial government bill provided that low-income families receive an amount of 100 euros per adult and 50 euros per child in addition to the back-to-school allowance which will be paid on August 16 for those attending school. In total, 8 million households bringing together 15 million French people were to be affected by the system, which included beneficiaries of the housing allowance, those on social minima and scholarship students. The budgetary cost of the measure was estimated at just under 1 billion euros.
4 million households versus 8 million
The Senate adopted an amendment by the general rapporteur for the budget, Jean-François Husson, which replaces it with a fixed bonus of 150 euros targeted only at the beneficiaries of the activity bonus and those of the disabled adult allowance. It is necessary “to ensure that the French who occupy a job, poor or modest workers, find at the time of the return to school exceptional support of 150 euros per household”, defending the fact of “giving a signal” to these workers who “often are missing out” on aid. All for a reduced cost of 200 million euros.
The Minister Delegate for Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, gave an unfavorable opinion on this amendment which “would amount to withdrawing the benefit of aid from 4 million poor households”, ie a division by two compared to the initial measure.
A measure castigated by the left
The amendment was adopted by the senators of the LR and centrist groups, with the exception of a handful of them, such as Elisabeth Doineau (Centrist Union), who said she was “hostile” to a measure which “excludes especially single women with children. The measure was lambasted by the senatorial left. “You take advantage of the night to allow you to hit the poorest once again”, accused the ecologist Thomas Dossus, the socialist Rémi Féraud denouncing a “very ideological amendment”.
#DirectSenat The right has just deprived the beneficiaries of social minima of the exceptional back-to-school bonus, to redirect it towards the activity bonus. Savings of €200 million along the way
Oppose the most precarious to the working poor, hard to find more miserable
— Thomas Dossus ???????? (@tomdoss) August 2, 2022
Pascal Brice, the president of the Federation of Solidarity Actors which brings together hundreds of associations specializing in the fight against exclusion, sees in this decision of the Senate “a way of opposing” low-income workers and those who do not work. not. “It’s dangerous,” he told AFP, explaining that “we must both deal with the difficulties of the middle class and support people living in poverty”.
The purchasing power package is broken down into two texts. The bill on emergency measures, the final vote of which is in progress in Parliament after a conclusive joint committee (CMP) and the amending finance bill, the CMP of which should also be final and whose final adoption will place by next Sunday.
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