The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, plagued by financial difficulties due to the number of beneficiaries of the active solidarity income (RSA), is preparing to benefit, from 2022, from the renationalization of the RSA, a measure on the menu of the budget considered this fall in Parliament, according to parliamentary and government sources, Thursday, September 9.
The support by the State of the RSA in Seine-Saint-Denis, in the form of a five-year experiment, will appear in the finance bill expected on September 22 in the Council of Ministers and from October 11 in the hemicycle of the National Assembly.
At the end of 2020, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, had promised this experiment because of the “Exceptional social difficulties facing the department”, the poorest in mainland France.
“We are effectively working on the nationalization of the RSA in Seine-Saint-Denis with the actors of the department. The negotiations have advanced very well and will be finalized very soon ”, confirmed to AFP Matignon, who mentions a budget line in the finance bill for ” to secure “ the device and who “Will be adjusted at the final conclusion of the negotiations”.
Seine-Saint-Denis is the first metropolitan department to see the payment of the RSA supported by the State. This has already been the case since 2019 in Mayotte and Guyana, and since the start of 2020 in Reunion. Strangled financially by the influx of beneficiaries of the RSA, this department of the Parisian suburbs had regularly called for the nationalization of the RSA.
Experimentation with the recentralization of the RSA
Seine-Saint-Denis has 90,000 beneficiaries of the RSA, for an annual envelope of more than 550 million euros per year, including more than 220 million which remained the responsibility of the department, according to its figures.
“This historic agreement, [dont la] finalization of the terms is in progress, [va] give us some oxygen [et] should allow us to double the integration policies ”, assures the president PS of the departmental council, Stéphane Troussel.
Experimentation with recentralization of the RSA is also provided for in a decentralization bill (3DS law) currently being examined in Parliament, but this text is not expected in the Assembly until December, which risked delay the application of the measure in Seine-Saint-Denis.
In mid-July, during the debates on this law, the Minister for Territorial Cohesion, Jacqueline Gourault, had mentioned Seine-Saint-Denis, but also “Other interested departments” by centralizing the RSA such as Aisne, Somme, Creuse, Corrèze, Gironde or Landes, territories with “Very different social profiles”.
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