Changes

The effects of the pandemic revealed more quickly and were more harmful for more vulnerable households, according to the quarterly data from the Labour Force Survey. Both the graph on the [[:File:Evolution in the amount of households.jpg|''Evolution in the amount of households'']] where all active members are unemployed and the graph on the [[:File:Spain_Evolution-in-the-amount-of-households-with-no-income_2005-2020_statisticalgraph_17864_eng.jpg|''Evolution in the amount of households with no income'']] show that the second quarter of 2020 marked a clear change in trend with respect to the one observed since 2014.

This change in direction entails an increased risk of unemployment, which is much greater for those who live in vulnerable households. The poorest households saw their income drop by a third in the initial months of the pandemic, especially if their members came from ‘informal employment’. This caused a rapid rise in the amount of households living in severe poverty, especially amongst those with dependent minors. The percentage of households with no income, whether due to lack of work or to not having received benefits, increased by almost 20% from the last quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2020. However, it shall be pointed out that this rise was nearly double as much for households with dependent minors (37%). Therefore, the economic impact of lockdown seems to have been significantly more severe in households with dependent minors, the long-term consequences of which are an issue of major concern.

The ‘Regional Minimum Incomes’ granted by the regional public administrations were until June 2020 the only public policies designed to cover the risk of extreme poverty. For several decades, the geographical coverage of this benefit has been very heterogeneous. In average, these benefits reached 17% of households at risk of poverty throughout Spain in 2019. However, whilst in some regions, such as the Basque Country (Euskadi/País Vasco) and Navarre (Navarra), all households with income below the poverty line were covered, in others, such as Castile–La Mancha (Castilla–La Mancha) and Andalusia (Andalucía), this benefit reached under 10% of them. In addition to this regional inequality, the Spanish minimum income model suffered from a low protective capacity and minimal coverage. With the onset of the COVID-19 health crisis, new measures were put in place to protect households living in extreme poverty. Indirect support mechanisms were developed and the regulations were revised to prevent the withdrawal of basic utilities due to non-payment (electricity, gas, water and telecommunications). Electricity rate subsidies were extended to a wider range of social groups, and automatic moratoria on mortgage payments and various aids to vulnerable tenants were introduced. The main problem was the delay in granting them, which probably made them less effective. It is important to point out that these were emergency and needed transitory measures not intended to solve long-term structural problems.

However, granting this benefit to the population for which it is intended is proving to be a slow and challenging process, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of this policy. The initial results indicate that several Andalusian provinces concentrate the highest amount of national Minimum Subsistence Income beneficiaries, i.e. Cádiz, Seville (Sevilla), Granada, Almería and Jaén. However, analysing the percentage of households receiving benefits with an income below 40% of the median (i.e. those at risk of severe poverty), draws a very different picture. For example, in Castile and León (Castilla y León) and Navarre (Navarra), over 20% of potential beneficiaries received the benefit, whilst this figure was only 7% for Catalonia (Catalunya/Cataluña).