For the first time in metropolitan France, the State should take charge of the financing of the RSA in the department from next year. The measure was already effective in Overseas France: Guyana, Mayotte and Reunion.
The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, in the grip of financial difficulties due to the number of recipients of the active solidarity income (RSA), is preparing to benefit from the “renationalization” of the RSA from 2022. A measure on the menu of the budget examined this fall in Parliament, AFP learned from parliamentary and government sources.
State support for the RSA in Seine-Saint-Denis, in the form of a 5-year experiment, will appear in the finance bill expected on September 22 in the Council of Ministers and from October 11 in the Chamber of the National Assembly.
First metropolitan department
At the end of 2020, Prime Minister Jean Castex had promised this experiment because of the “exceptional social difficulties faced by the department“, the poorest in mainland France.”We are actually working on the nationalization of the RSA in Seine-Saint-Denis with the actors of the department. Negotiations have progressed 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 outcome of the negotiations“.
Seine-Saint-Denis is the first metropolitan department to see the payment of the RSA paid for by the State. This has already been the case since 2019 in Mayotte and Guyana, and since the beginning of 2020 in Reunion.
A “historic agreement”
Strangled financially by the influx of RSA recipients, this department in the Paris suburbs had regularly called for the “renationalization” of the RSA. Seine-Saint-Denis has 90,000 RSA recipients, for an annual envelope of more than 550 million euros per year, of which more than 220 million remained the responsibility of the department, according to its figures. “This historic agreement“whose”finalization of terms is in progress“will”give us some oxygen” and “should allow us to double the integration policies“, assures the PS president of the Departmental Council, Stéphane Troussel.
“Other interested departments”
The experimentation of a recentralisation of the RSA is also planned in a decentralization bill (known as the “3DS law”) currently being examined in Parliament, but this text is only expected in the Assembly in December, which risked delaying 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 the recentralisation of the RSA such as Aisne, Somme, Creuse, Corrèze, Gironde or Landes, territories with”very different social profiles“.
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