Anti-poverty Strategy: is this really all the EU can do to eradicate poverty?
The EU anti-poverty strategy was published on 6th May, as part of a broader package also including a proposal for a Council Recommendation on fighting housing exclusion and two communications: one on breaking the cycle of child poverty and one on reinforcing the strategy for the rights of persons with disabilities up to 2030.
In this reaction, we will focus on the strategy which is the first-ever instrument of this kind produced by the Commission. The strategy is particularly essential in light of the long-lasting cost-of-living crisis and considering that the EU is dramatically lagging behind on the target laid out in the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan of reducing the number of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion by at least 15 million by 2030. This is what the Commission acknowledges in its document: “Acting to prevent and combat poverty is more urgent than ever”. Does the document meet expectations?
A positive framework
At first reading, the strategy contains several positive elements:
- A life-cycle approach
- Access to services, including social services, is identified as key both to combat and prevent poverty
- An intersectional approach
- The Commission calls on Member States to ensure anti-poverty policy frameworks are in place, at national, regional or local levels
- Quality of jobs is mentioned as an essential feature of the fight against poverty
- Education and lifelong learning as a crucial building block of social inclusion
- The impact of climate change and the role of education and training are both taken into account.
Hard issue, soft response
However, despite this encouraging framework, the strategy seems to be an instrument that is too soft to tackle the complex issue of poverty. In fact, all measures announced are soft law instruments, namely Council Recommendations. These include: a Council Recommendation to support easier and integrated access to services, an updated Commission Recommendation on energy Poverty, a Council Recommendation on fighting housing exclusion. Moreover, Member States are targeted with several calls by the Commission, for instance to ensure anti-poverty policy frameworks are in place, at national, regional or local levels, but no obligations are attached to them. Positive claims are made, like that the fight against poverty should be central in the accession process of candidate countries, but how to do so is not explained.
More relevance to the role of CSOs and people experiencing poverty
Another element of concern in the identification of social partners as sole interlocutors for the development of two initiatives: a first-stage consultation of European social partners to activate persons excluded from the labour market and support gender equality and a Commission Recommendation providing evidence-based policy guidance and best practices to prevent and combat in work poverty. While it is essential that social partners are included, civil society organizations and people experiencing poverty should be equally involved. Generally, the strategy acknowledges their importance throughout the text, but fails to demand their involvement for each initiative.
Modest resources cannot sustain an ambitious strategy
Finally, the weakest point of the strategy is the resources allocated to it. The Commission refers to the MFF proposal which includes a 14% target for social investment including social inclusion and fight against (child) poverty. As it has been pointed out already by several social CSOs, this target amounts to a lower level of resources than what is provided under the current ESF+ and its design increases the autonomy of Member States to allocate resources across different objectives, failing to ensure the necessary guarantees that they will be employed to eradicate poverty.
While SOLIDAR welcomes the strategy and its overall approach to poverty, we remain negatively surprised by the evident gap between the ambitions of the EPSR Action Plan target and the objective to eradicate poverty by 2050 on the one hand and the financial and legislative tools mobilized for this on the other.
If it is more important than ever to fight against poverty and social exclusion, is this really all that the EU can do? We don’t think so. This is why this strategy represents only a first – albeit crucial – step that needs to be accompanied by more incisive actions and more binding measures going forward.
