Welfare, Csel: “A ‘treasure’ arrives for common standard needs, 46% in the South”

A treasure arrives to be allocated to welfare and addressed, in particular, to the municipalities disadvantaged by the old methods of calculation. Approximately 216 million euros have been allocated for 2021, of which 46% will go to the entities of the South. on local welfare disseminated by Istat (drawn up in 2021 but based on 2018 data). The ” largest share of resources will go to disadvantaged institutions, in particular those in the south ” for a long time penalized by the criterion of historical expenditure ”. The government has decided to take the field on the one hand by allocating new resources and on the other by changing the criteria by which resources are allocated, passing from historical expenditure to standard needs. But what are the standard requirements? In the past, the amount of resources that were transferred from the state to local administrations, explains the CSEL, was determined on the basis of the so-called historical expenditure. ” That mechanism meant that the historically most prosperous territories continued to grab the largest resources, thus penalizing the areas with a less prosperous past. ” With the 2009 law, the CSEL recalls, an attempt was made ” subvert the paradigm, introducing the mechanism of standard needs; indicators that estimate the resources a local authority needs to provide fundamental services such as local public transport, waste management, local police, education and social services. ” These indicators are calculated taking into account the territorial characteristics of administrations and a series of demographic and socio-economic aspects (number of inhabitants, population density, quantity of services offered, labor costs, etc.) and have been established ” with the declared intent to redistribute, through the equalization share of the fund of municipal solidarity, the resources in a more equitable way among the various Italian municipalities ”. As the numbers show, ” the establishment of this mechanism was not enough to achieve the purpose ”, underlines the Study Center. More than 10 years after the debut of standard needs, in fact, “abysmal differences persist between the amount of resources allocated to the social sector in one place compared to another in the Peninsula”. With the latest regulatory changes governed by the recent Dpcm, the Government has quantified the additional resources of the ‘Municipal Solidarity Fund’ at 651 million euros per year, to be allocated to the development of social services in the municipalities of the regions with ordinary statute that present the largest shortcomings. However, these will be financed gradually from 2021 to 2030. The additional resources, the dossier reads, ” also have the task of compensating for the lower resources which, in light of the new criteria, have been allocated to the entities penalized by the change in methodology ”. As emerges from an elaboration of the Study Center for local authorities based on data from the Ministry of Economy and Istat, the innovations introduced in the mechanism for calculating standard requirements have led to the displacement of 41.5 million from Central-Northern Italy to Southern Italy. To pay the pledge are mainly the administrations of the Center which contribute 24.7 million, against 16.8 in the North. Looking at the individual regions, the minus sign concerns Liguria (-335.360), Veneto (-5.044.658.81), Lazio (-12.027.069.25), Lombardy (-21.888.418.18), Marche (-4.325. 721.57) and Emilia-Romagna (-14.360.804.08). Given that the negative results, as anticipated, however, have been sterilized through extra resources, the combination of recent regulatory changes has meant that the overall balance is positive for just under 176 million euros.