Stone aid in Hérault: national subsidies serving a local policy – www.espacite.com

A tool made available to EPCIs with a PLH as well as to Departments, the delegation of building aid allows local authorities to manage and instruct national aid for the production of social housing and the improvement of private housing. This delegation therefore makes it possible to adapt its aid to its territorial issues by offering the possibility, in compliance with a national framework, to adjust the scale of subsidies relating to the improvement of private stock and to propose a scale on the margins local rents in the social housing stock. In addition, the management of aid makes it possible to seek to direct this aid according to local planning documents and local policies, while taking into account national orientations, and to facilitate the mobilization of actors in a partnership logic on the scale of the delegation territory. This delegation is part of an agreement between the State and the delegated territory.

Delegate of stone aid since 2006, the Departmental Council of Hérault wishes to request the renewal of this delegation from the State, by signing a 4^th convention, in order to continue its commitment to the implementation of the housing policy. This delegation concerns the departmental territory except the urban communities of Béziers Méditerranée, Hérault Méditerranée, Sète Agglopôle Méditerranée, and Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, themselves delegatees of stone aid.

In this context, Espacité supports the Departmental Council on two aspects: the evaluation of the previous delegation agreement, and the preparation of the future delegation agreement.

The delegation agreement sets the objectives for the next six years, as well as the intentions of the signatories and the regulatory obligations that apply to this delegation. The evaluation phase must make it possible to show the capacity that the delegation of stone aid had to meet the needs of the territories on a quantitative and qualitative level and to optimize this aid. It must also analyze the consistency between the specific challenges of the territory and the mobilization of delegated State aid. This evaluation, enriched with workshops as well as a benchmark carried out with comparable territories, will allow Espacité to propose work avenues to the Departmental Council for the future delegation agreement. These workshops notably made it possible to cross-reference the views between social landlords and the EPCI of the territory and to jointly identify solutions to respond to local difficulties, while consolidating reflections on the specific questions of the Department: support for social diversity in relaxed territory and the adaptation of local rent margins to social and energy issues.

This evaluation as well as the methods of preparing the future delegation agreement thus contribute to the partnership dynamic around the delegation of aid for stone, and more broadly, around the implementation of the housing policy on the departmental territory.