“It is through the State that our nation was built, fortified, consolidated. It is with the State that our social model and our public services which make us unique and our pride, were built. It is still towards the State that our fellow citizens turn in the event of difficulty or crisis, and it is very often from the State that solutions come. We have this culture of the State and we can be proud of it,” welcomes Gabriel Attal first, on the sidelines of his remarks. Before admitting: “We must be careful not to think that everything must go through the State, always and all the time. The State must be both a conductor who coordinates everyone’s action, it must be a model who sets an example, proposes, dares, and it must facilitate the lifting of constraints and help everyone and act. The State must always live up to the expectations of the French.”
Visiting a France Services house in Sceaux, in Hauts-de-Seine (92), in the company of Stanislas Guerini, Minister of Public Transformation, and Marina Ferrari, Secretary of State for Digital, the Prime Minister announces launching a “colossal work”, to make “debureaucratization, an objective”, and “simplification, a course”.
Artificial intelligence, “a chance to put humans back at the heart of our public services”
To meet the objective of “responding to a historic transition”, Gabriel Attal announces that he wants to “put artificial intelligence at the service of the French and our public services”. While he recognizes that technology arouses both “enthusiasm” and “concern,” he calls for being proactive on the subject: “Let’s choose AI, not suffer from it!” », he exclaims. He thus highlights the experimental launch of Albert, “generative AI tool created within the DINUM (Interministerial Directorate responsible for Digital), with the ambition of responding to all use cases of the administration”, but also to “promote human support”, by “saving time for agents”, through “simpler procedures”, “faster deadlines”, “more secure responses”, to achieve “public policies more effective”.
The Prime Minister also justifies the importance that the tool was imagined and created in France (a pioneer in the field), seeing it as a way to “conquer our sovereignty”, and “not to depend on foreign technologies”. In this regard, he recalls that the use of artificial intelligence within the tax administration has “revolutionized the fight against fraud”, and made it possible to recover around 40 million euros. In the same way, a new artificial intelligence will be deployed by Bercy, in order to “pre-write the responses to the 16 million annual online requests”, as well as the pre-examination of “4,000 environmental projects submitted each year in the DREAL to accelerate the ecological transition”. In addition, the Aristotle tool will be responsible for “offering quizzes to students”, in order to facilitate their revisions, but also for “making 3000 hours of lessons accessible to students with disabilities”, via the conversion of videos in subtitles. Such technology will be “transposed to other public services from the end of the year for the transcription of legal hearings, the filing of complaints or medical reports”, announces Gabriel Attal, who also brushes aside the argument of dehumanization: “AI will not replace public officials, but will allow them to concentrate on the most important missions,” he assures.
“Debureaucratize France and simplify its daily life”
The Prime Minister also demonstrates his desire to go further in the project of “debureaucratization”, recalling from the outset that the deadline for renewing one’s identity card or passport has been halved in one year, and that the making an appointment to file a complaint is now possible “in half of the departments”. On this subject, Gabriel Attal also announced the generalization of online complaint filing by June, as well as the implementation of “video-complaints” from October. “Since 2019, 100 administrative forms have been simplified,” he salutes, adding the importance of this project to “continue to rebuild trust”. A trust which is manifested, according to the tenant of Matignon, by the direct relationship between the agent and the user: “By the end of the year, 30 essential operators such as France Travail, the CAF, the national police or the “tax administration, will reach 85% rate of telephone calls”, he promises, also confirming the simplification of the pay slip, with the aim of “avoid errors” and “fight against non-recourse”. Within this objective of confidence, the Prime Minister underlines the establishment of the “right to make mistakes in tax matters”, which has enabled “230,000 regularizations”, making it possible to prove that the administration is “not only there to sanction.”
The simplification project desired by the tenant of Matignon is also illustrated through the bureaucratic complexity: “Everything must be intelligible and accessible”, he highlights, hoping that “the administration speaks to the French, not to itself”. even “. Thus, he announced the launch of the “Speak to us French” program, which aims to “review all online content and forms, ministry by ministry”. “We will translate everything that needs to be translated”, he guarantees, also promising a simplification of procedures “at key stages in the lives of our fellow citizens”, announcing that from now on, “from 2025, at each start of the school year, the files of “registration will be pre-filled”, and that the tax data will be used to award a school scholarship, and this “without the slightest step” for the beneficiaries. Also simplification of online voting proxy, now extended to national and local elections (Editor’s note: only possible today for European elections).
Local authorities will also be affected by this debureaucratization, in continuation of the government’s commitments to simplify standards, which Gabriel Attal had made one of his hobby horses at the beginning of the month, before the senators. The Prime Minister thus announces the “end of the annual obligation to empty municipal swimming pools”, which he considers “irrelevant in relation to the controls of the operators”, and with regard to “our requirements with regard to the ecological transition”. In addition, requests for state subsidies can now be made electronically, “reducing the length of files”.
“Bring public services back to the field”
The Prime Minister finally sets his final objective to “bring public services back to the field”: “An effective State is a State which obtains results, which changes things (…), which does not create additional problems and does not give a uniform response decided by a Parisian office”, he thunders, claiming to refuse to “sink into the comfort of complexity”, which “stifles the desire to act”. Thus, it indicates the launch of the “France simplification” system, which will be responsible for “resolving the most complex administrative situations that come up from the field”, also encouraging the decision-making of the prefect via his “power of exemption”.
Already announced yesterday by our colleagues from Le Figaro, the Prime Minister confirms the extension of the France Services network in “300 medium-sized towns” by 2027, bringing their number to 3,000 in France by this date, while recalling that “ 9 out of 10 French people today live less than 20 minutes from a France Services house. Riding on the “96% satisfaction rate” and the some 10 million procedures carried out by these premises, Gabriel Attal reveals having decided to extend the range of services, “to include the URSAAF and Agirc-Arrco procedures”.
