The government releases its figures on the impact of the reform of personalized housing allowances (APL).
Since January 1, the amount is no longer calculated in relation to the resources of year N-2 but according to the income of the last twelve months with quarterly updating.
The other calculation parameters remain the same.
A change supposed to stick as closely as possible to the needs of beneficiaries - nearly 6 million in total - but sometimes criticized by associations in the sector.
According to the first report published this Thursday by the Ministry of Housing and relating to the month of January alone, if the reform in itself maintained the rights for more than half of the beneficiaries (52.2%), it led to increase them for 18.2% and decrease them for 29.6%.
The gain is on average 49 euros when the loss is displayed at 73 euros!
To read also "I went from 347 euros of APL per month to zero overnight": the perverse effects of the reform are being felt
"These figures are in line with those we published," explains Arnaud de Broca, General Delegate of Unafo, the Professional Union for Supported Housing which represents 140,000 housing units for people in precarious situations. The number of losers is very large and there are more losers than winners. »Thus, if 115,000 people become beneficiaries of APL thanks to the reform, this will remove 394,000 beneficiaries from the system.
"The objective of the reform is to calculate the right to the fairest, based on the reality of the resources of the moment, but the resources increase from one year to another", once again justified this Thursday in Les Echoes Emmanuelle Wargon, Minister of Housing.
A logic that Arnaud de Broca understands but he calls for better identifying the losers who are the most fragile and to help them.
“At Unafo, we have noticed a strong impact of the reform among young people who lose more than others,” he says.
There may be other measures to put in place to reduce the effects on the most fragile people.
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1.1 billion euros saved by the State
To correct certain biases, two measures have already been implemented. For students, with the same situation, they keep the same level of APL and those who have a job are no longer penalized unlike the previous system. Apprentices benefit from a reduction in their resources, a measure from which young people on professionalization contracts will benefit from September (in the meantime, they keep the allowance level of December 2020).
More generally, the implementation of the reform should allow the State to save 1.1 billion euros in 2021 compared to the old system. This is much more than the 750 million euros provided for in the Finance law passed in 2020. This anticipated a drop in income - and therefore an increase in APL - due to the Covid crisis but the support measures (unemployment partial for example) made it possible to limit its effects. But, as there are 240,000 more beneficiaries than in 2020, the total amount of APL paid this year will be, as expected, 15.6 billion euros.
