Policies to help the homeless are still based too much on emergency accommodation to the detriment of permanent housing, regretted Thursday the Court of Auditors, while admitting progress in this direction.
The institution evaluated the results of the policy implemented since the start of Emmanuel Macron's five-year term to help the homeless.
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This follows the “
Housing First
”
philosophy
.
It aims to find sustainable housing for the people concerned as quickly as possible, instead of placing them in emergency accommodation and seeking to reintegrate them socially before resolving the issue of their habitat.
Results “below” expectations
For now, this policy has obtained "
results overall below expectations,
" said the Court in a summary Thursday.
“
Progress is still more experimental or marginal than systemic, far from a change of scale and the ambition of structural transformation
,” she continues.
Admittedly, the Court notes that this policy made it possible to permanently house around 80,000 homeless people per year in 2018 and 2019. But it notes that this is insufficient when new people are constantly finding themselves on the street, in particular recent immigrants.
The institution believes that too few homeless people still manage to find their place in social housing, judging in particular that there should be provision to create more family pensions.
On the contrary, "
far from consolidating the housing first policy, several recent decisions, in reverse, have led to the production and sustainability of accommodation places
", underlines the Court.
Progress margins
Since the onset of the economic and health crisis of the virus, the government has placed great emphasis on the conversion of hotel rooms into emergency accommodation.
As such, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, responded to the Court of Auditors by evoking the need to maintain emergency solutions, in parallel with the orientation towards sustainable housing.
"
I want this double temporality
", wrote Jean Castex, admitting however that "
significant margins for progress still exist
" in the policy of assistance to the homeless.