Social Security now denies the objectives that Escrivá set for the Minimum Income

“The Minimum Living Income (IMV) will lift more than a million people out of extreme poverty”. With this phrase, without the slightest doubt, José Luis Escrivá, the former Minister of Social Security, presented the star measure of his Ministry in June 2020. It had only been three months since Covid had changed the world and begun to sink the economy, and the Government launched the IMV with the expectation of reaching “850,000 homes in total and 2.3 million people”, of which one million had income below 3,000 euros per year and were considered to be in extreme poverty.

This objective has been abandoned by the current Ministry of Social Security headed by Elma Saiz, mainly because they consider that the improvement that has occurred in Spain in the labor market has reduced the number of potential beneficiaries.. A sensation, however, that they do not confirm with data, since they cannot calculate how many people the benefit could reach, as they acknowledged this Thursday when publishing the first official statistics on the IMV. It could also have influenced, perhaps, that the figure has turned out to be unattainable.

“When the IMV was approved we had 18.5 million members, now with January data we are at 20.6 million. There has been a substantial change in the labor market, with 2 million more people working in a market that offers better quality of jobs than it did before the crisis, which is why this persistence in seeking the 850,000…. “We have to refine that photograph because society is changing, the job market evolves and that somehow alters the photo that can be had at a given moment,” sources from the Ministry pointed out yesterday.. They do not want that numerical objective to be used, but they do not give another one either because they say they cannot calculate it.

Although that was the challenge that Escrivá set for himself, time showed that it was an overly ambitious plan and that there were obstacles that the Ministry had not taken into account – among other things, due to the haste with which it had to approve this measure. under pressure from Podemos and the then vice president Pablo Iglesias-. Among them were a proportion of people who, although on paper they had no income, they did receive it in the underground economy and, therefore, had no incentive to request the benefit; another group of potential beneficiaries who, being on the margins of society, did not have the capacity or tools to interact with the Public Administration; and a series of overly strict requirements that limited the scope, among other.

To overcome this, the Executive was making legal modifications, signing agreements with third sector entities (NGOs, for example) and deploying dissemination campaigns (a bus toured the entire country to bring the IMV closer to its potential beneficiaries), bringing the penetration It improved but never reached the initially set objectives.. The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) poured the first bucket of cold water in July 2022, announcing that at the end of 2021 only 284,000 families would receive the aid – which does not have a fixed amount, but rather complements the beneficiary's income up to reach a certain threshold-.

In December 2021, the Government approved the creation of a new Children's Aid Complement (CAPI) – which is now 115 euros for children under three years old, 80.50 euros for those aged 3 to 5 years, and 57.50 for those aged 6 to 17 – intended for both IMV recipients with children and other low incomes. “The supplement of aid for children that will be launched within the framework of the Minimum Living Income will reach the beneficiaries of the benefit with dependent minors, but also other low-income families, since the guaranteed income thresholds will be raised and assets established for each type of home,” Escrivá explained then..

While to collect the IMV, the assets cannot exceed 28,495 euros in the case of a family of one adult and one child; The limit to receive the Childhood Aid Complement is 45,678 euros, meaning there are many more potential beneficiaries. The same happens with assets, which must not exceed 56,990 euros in households with one adult and one minor to access the IMV, and however can reach 60,905 euros to request the CAPI.

For this reason, while up to 850,000 beneficiaries could receive the IMV, according to Escrivá, the AIReF calculated in its second opinion (published in 2023 with data as of the end of 2022) that the CAPI could be received by 1.5 million people.. “The supplement is a benefit aimed at both potential beneficiaries with IMV children and non-IMV beneficiaries,” explained this institution, and even recommended to the Government that both aids could be requested separately, since the CAPI request is made with the same IMV form, although later this is not perceived.

Half a million counting those who do not receive the IMV

The institution chaired by Cristina Herrero took the opportunity to demand that the Government periodically make public the number of IMV recipients and reported that in 2022 the number of recipients remained stagnant at 284,000 homes – of which 122,789 also collected the CAPI -, and to which were added 150,529 who only received the CAPI.

Now the new Ministry of Social Security has listened to AIReF's requests and has published statistics regarding the IMV for the first time.. In them, several things draw attention. The first, that the Executive counts as beneficiaries of the IMV families that do not receive it: they only collect the supplement for children, without the State completing their income.. This leads the Government to say that there are 557,405 beneficiaries in Spain, when in reality only 376,073 families receive the Minimum Income (of which 181,075 receive only that income and 194,998 collect both the IMV and the CAPI), because they add to this group the 181,332 families that only collect the CAPI without receiving the IMV.

This is a methodology that AIReF does not share because these people are not receiving the IMV, as this media has been able to confirm, but that the Ministry defends at all costs, ignoring the fact that Escrivá himself presented it as a supplement that “other income households would collect.” “discharges who do not receive the IMV”.

It is also curious to see that we are very far from the objectives that former Minister Escrivá had set for himself.. Of the 232,889 single-person households to which the benefit was believed to reach, the IMV has only reached 127,746 (slightly more than half); They expected to provide protection to 126,061 two-adult households, but it has only reached 35,878 (less than a third), or it would cover 46,151 three-adult families, a figure that has finally remained at 13,498, according to data published yesterday.

In families with children, the objectives are not met either, but there is some distortion, since it was estimated, for example, that the IMV would cover 72,901 households with an adult and a child, but today it reaches 57,902. The problem is that this amount includes those who do not charge the IMV and only charge the CAPI.