2023-08-28 04:00:00
Berlin The planned basic child security splits the traffic light. At the two-day cabinet retreat in Meseberg that begins on Tuesday, the coalition wants to settle its dispute over the performance. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) said that this week it would be clarified how basic child security would be structured in concrete terms.
Until then, it is worth taking another look at the phenomenon of child poverty in Germany.
“The relative child poverty in Germany has been consistently high for years. In 2022, every fifth child was considered to be at risk of or affected by poverty,” says one of the public drafts on basic child security.
Depending on which definition is used, different values are obtained. First, there is the so-called at-risk-of-poverty rate. Those at risk of poverty are those who have less than 60 percent of the median income of the entire population.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, this applied to almost 2.2 million or 14.8 percent of children and young people under the age of 18 last year.
However, the concept of relative poverty is problematic. Because even if the state were to transfer 5,000 euros a month to all adolescents, the same children would still be “poor”.
The definition of so-called material deprivation is narrower. A list of criteria is used to check what children have and what they don’t, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, an internet connection in the house or games.
According to the criteria defined by the European statistical office Eurostat, six percent of all children under the age of 16 were affected by material deprivation in Germany in 2021, in the EU the rate was significantly higher at 13 percent.
The broadest is the definition of poverty and social exclusion. It applies if at least one of the following three conditions applies to a person: their disposable income is below the risk of poverty line, their household is affected by considerable material and social deprivation, or they live in a household with a very low level of employment.
Read more about the coalition dispute over basic child security
According to the Federal Statistical Office, 24 percent of those under the age of 18 in Germany were affected by poverty or social exclusion last year. The rate is just below the EU average of 24.7 percent. Two thirds of all EU countries have lower quotas.
Where is child poverty particularly pronounced?
Child poverty occurs particularly in single-parent households or in families with three or more children.
In a study using data from 2021, the Bertelsmann Foundation also examined the regional distribution in Germany. Accordingly, children in Bremen are most at risk of poverty, followed by Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia.
The lowest at-risk-of-poverty rates among children and young people were recorded in Bavaria, Brandenburg and Baden-Württemberg.
How has the number of children and young people among the recipients of citizen income developed?
In 2015, around 1.94 million under-18s were still receiving basic security benefits from the state, but by 2022 the number had fallen slightly to 1.85 million, according to statistics from the Federal Employment Agency (BA).
In the current year the trend is upwards again. In March, around 1.96 million children and young people lived in households with citizens’ income recipients.
What role does migration play in child poverty?
Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner drew a lot of criticism with his statement that there was “a very clear connection between immigration and child poverty”. But the numbers prove the FDP leader right.
From 2015 to last year, the number of children with German citizenship receiving basic security fell by almost a third, from 1.57 million to 1.06 million.
>> Read the interview with Finance Minister Christian Lindner here: “We can quickly end up in the second division”
The number of foreign nationals receiving benefits under the age of 18 more than doubled in the same period from a good 366,000 to almost 797,000.
Christian Lindner
The Federal Minister of Finance is critical of the plans for basic child security.
(Photo: Reuters)
This is mainly due to the increased influx of refugees since 2015. By March of this year, the number of underage recipients of citizen benefits with a foreign passport had risen sharply again to a good 933,000 due to the arrival of Ukrainian refugees.
In 2015, around 81 percent of the young beneficiaries still had German citizenship, according to BA statistics in March of this year it was just over half.
What must children definitely have to live on in order not to be poor?
This is debatable. Family Minister Lisa Paus (Greens) calls for basic child security that goes hand in hand with real improvements in performance. On the other hand, the FDP wants to bundle and better interlink existing services, but not increase the standard rates.
So far, the subsistence benefits for children have been determined according to the survey of income and consumption (EVS), which is carried out every five years. The Federal Statistical Office and the State Statistical Offices also ask 60,000 households what they can afford.
In order to determine the standard needs for children, the bottom 20 percent of couple households with one child, graded according to income, are used, recipients of basic income are excluded.
There are a number of criticisms of the procedure, for example that only adults are interviewed for the EVS and children with their specific needs are only indirectly heard.
>> Read here: Parental allowance, child benefit and Co.: How parents get maximum benefits from the state
Or that households that are entitled to supplementary social benefits but do not take advantage of these out of shame or ignorance are not excluded from the sample.
In addition, critics argue that simply securing a livelihood is not enough. It must also be about enabling adolescents to have a “normal” childhood.
In the coalition agreement, the SPD, Greens and FDP agreed to redefine the socio-cultural subsistence level in connection with basic child security, for which Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) would be responsible.
At the end of May, an alliance of social, welfare, consumer and child protection associations as well as youth organizations and trade unions accused Heil of still being inactive on this issue.
With the exception of a few non-binding descriptive papers, the Ministry of Labor has not made any recognizable efforts to meet the obligation to redefine the socio-cultural subsistence level for children, according to the alliance’s appeal.
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