Changes

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In March 2021 (the date up to which the information on the graphs and maps is extended), the national administration made its own assessment: just over 870,000 applications had been processed out of the 1,150,000 received. 600,000 of these had been rejected, 210,000 had been approved and 62,000 were in the process of being corrected. In other words, approved applications accounted for only 25% of those processed. This Department also provided information on the profile of beneficiaries and identified two particularly vulnerable groups, i.e. women and minors. Households were made up of an average of 2.77 people and the average benefit for each household was 460 euros. Over 70% of beneficiaries were women, 43% of the people living in households benefiting from the national Minimum Subsistence Income were minors, and almost 70% of the households included at least one minor.

After assessing this measure as positive, all interim reports highlight major shortcomings and gaps, i.e. it is insufficient, it is not conditioned (by contrast, Regional Minimum Income policies are conditioned to beneficiaries taking part in labour or social inclusion measures), paperwork is too rigid (some potential beneficiaries were excluded due to some incompatibilities, for not meeting all requirements, for being ‘outside the system’ or for not knowing how to fill in forms) and there is a deficit in multilevel internal governance. This policy brings Spain closer to the social protection levels in northern European states, yet it is still far from being fully laid out. This explains why thousands of households with no income or in extremely difficult situations have continued to be assisted by charity and their members have queued up the so-called “hunger queues”. The latest reform to this policy, introduced by Royal Decree Law 3/2021, of 2 February, included the following text in the memorandum: “The period of implementation of this policy since it entered into force has made evident the need to improve some aspects of the regulation to enable covering the largest possible amount of people and to include situations that the current regulation does not take into account or does not operate in such a way as to allow some people to be correctly covered”. Maybe these changes together with some other adjustments might enable increasing the amount of beneficiaries gradually up to the 850,000 households initially envisaged. More attention should also be paid to ensuring that the regulation favours and reinforces social and labour insertion.