Benefits bureaucracy estimated to save French state billions in unpaid welfare
Nearly one-third of people in France entitled to some form of state aid fail to benefit – often because they are put off by the complexity of the application procedure, an investigation has found. The public purse savings are estimated at several billion euros each year.
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The evidence is startling. People with disabilities, those looking for work, or who need a hand to feed and clothe their children have all confronted the bureaucratic wall behind which the French state aid to which they are entitled is concealed.
Some struggle on to the end. Others – an estimated 30 percent of those with some form of entitlement – simply give up.
Since the savings to the state are considerable, there is not much political pressure to make access to the social assistance labyrinth any easier.
An investigation by Marjolaine Koch, a journalist at Radio France, suggests that the problem is embedded in the French administrative system, with the same problems being confronted by would-be applicants across a broad range of state agencies.
Administrative nightmare
Koch relates the struggles of a mother of a seven-year-old child with Down's syndrome.
In order to qualify for a few hours of home help, have her daughter given special assistance in school, and get repaid for the child's sessions with an occupational therapist, the mother had to complete several different questionnaires, each running to 20 pages.
Despite the woman's perseverance, her application for a special allowance was refused, without explanation. It took two visits to the courts to have her daughter's rights respected. She wonders how many families simply give up in the face of such administrative obstacles.
Koch also reports the experience of a job-seeker at the French employment and training agency, Pôle emploi.
Ill with Covid, she missed one week of training. Her allowance for her sick days was docked from her benefits, with the health insurance branch of social welfare supposed to make up the difference. They didn't.
One month later, the job-seeker received a demand for a repayment of 115 euros, an impossible bill for someone long-term unemployed.
She applied to have the debt cancelled, but got no reply.
Can the state afford more efficiency?
According to Koch, the move to a computer-based public service has further marginalised certain fragile sectors of the population.
Fewer staff are available to respond to applicants' questions, while websites can be off-putting for the visually impaired or some older users. And the online systems are unforgiving of human error.
The computerisation of social security in France has made life more complicated for 13 million users, according to a recent report by the government-appointed Public Rights Protector,
The number of people failing to claim their legitimate social benefits is constantly increasing, despite various efforts over the past decade to reduce the digital gap, says Daniel Verger of the charity Secours Catholique.
With state spending on social welfare already at €761 billion in 2019, the year before the Covid pandemic, the question remains whether the national coffers could survive a more efficient system, in which every applicant got what she or he was entitled to.
France already spends a larger share of its national income on pensions, healthcare, unemployment benefits and other social programmes than any other wealthy country, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In 2019, welfare spending amounted to 31 percent of its gross domestic product, compared to the OECD average of 20 percent.
As part of his successful re-election campaign earlier this year, President Emmanuel Macron pledged to centralise all social benefits in a single system, a change that could affect up to 20 million French people.
He also proposed reforms to the benefits system that would require the unemployed to undertake 15 to 20 hours of work or training per week.
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