Elena Popova: “Rights of parents in the Russian Federation should be united”

The Tribuna program’s guest is the senator of the Volgograd Region, a member of the Federation Council Committee on Social Policy, Elena Popova. Together with the anchor of the program Vladimir Nesterov, she discusses social policy, including the governmental support of families with children.

- Amendments have been recently made to the rules for usage of the maternity capital. Could you tell us more about them?

- The maternity capital program ends in 2016, but most likely it will be continued. The concept of the demographic policy of the Russian Federation notes the very good progress on monitoring of the implementation of all activities of the federal maternity capital. A small number of regions of the Russian Federation is beginning paying regional maternity capitals in 2015. This is the second part, which previously did not exist. It allowed the regions to develop regional programs only on condition that we have proposed a federal health capital. Today, it is a big sum – about 450 thousand rubles.

We have already passed a stage, when our citizens without justification of the results of the maternity capital spending trends wrote statements and received 12 thousand directly. Today in the implementation of anti-crisis program, we proposed another amendment, and our citizens in the same way, without spending targets, were able to withdraw 20 thousand rubles from the maternity capital. We hope that that's the measure which will increase the yield of families with children, especially during school holidays, especially in the run-up to prepare children for the autumn term in the school. We are talking about the fact that here we have introduced norms in which the family does not wait until the youngest child is three-year old.

- But is this a one-off kind of help?

- This is a one-time opportunity. And the second rule, which was also  introduced quite recently, allows you to direct maternity capital for a down-payment on a mortgage. This is very important. We let regions allocate funds for mortgages. There are some regions where the so-called social mortgage is adopted, where the family has an opportunity to pay small amounts for their mortgage on a monthly basis, but, unfortunately, that this amount of collateral is 30% of the original value of the property. We hope that today they will decrease the sum due to the maternal capital. The amendments have already been adopted.

The State Duma is also considering an amendment which is not a draft yet. It is the society’s suggestion – to spend the maternal capital on curing or rehabilitating disabled or sick children. OMI doesn’t cover the expenditures for the rehabilitation of a child. 

Regions which introduce additional regional maternal capital are trying to balance the direction of the activity declared by the federal program and the necessities in certain regions, which could be partially covered by the regional maternal capital. A family spends the money on their individual necessities. We want the test project in the Leningrad Region to spend the maternal capital on rehabilitation of children to become a draft on the federal maternal capital.

- The experiment in the Leningrad Region showed good results, didn’t it?

- It has had good results, according to our monitoring. All citizens in all regions have a right to address the legislation assembly and send their initiatives to the State Duma.

-  We move from the problem of demography to the problem of governmental support of families with children. What are the new issues which are considered in this direction today?

-  The governmental support of families with children has several directions. And all these directions are connected with the National Strategy of Acting in Favor of Children. Within the strategy, six big basic documents have been adopted. Each of them requires a complex of measures on implementation of the strategy – the strategy of upbringing and the strategy of the Family Code. We cannot provide a support to the family for health recovering of a child without providing them with tickets to resorts in summer. It would be strange if the strategy of upbringing provides parents with free educational programs or half-paid programs to develop spiritual and moral upbringing without the creation of conditions for a family to buy necessary equipment for participating in sports, for example.

The family support is a complex of activities which should be defined not only by federal laws. Today, through federal laws, we enable regions to develop their regional laws in such a way that they would really work. Even if a federal law is very good, it will work differently in different regions with different number of families with children, with different demographic situations, with different levels of governmental support. We have rich and poor regions. According to its needs, a region should develop its regional laws on the support of families

In 2012 the forum “Russia with Many Children” took place. According to its results, the State Duma was recommended to adopt a new draft on the governmental support of families with three and more children (the old law was adopted in 1992). Of course, we understood why the Ministry of Social Security rejected it. It demanded huge sums of money. Probably there should be another variant of the draft, but the rights of parents living with their children in the Russian Federation should be united

If a mother with many children comes with her baby to Moscow Zoo, her, ID with photographs should serve as a pass to all our federal museums of national importance, to all activities that she wants to see her children doing. 

It is not a problem of a lack of laws, because we have more than enough, but there is no logical chain constructed from one federal law to each individual municipality and rural settlement. 

Most of the laws we have are based on the possibility of granting some exemptions, but a financial support mechanism doesn't always play a key role. And the government has the intention of using the targeted benefits. 

Of course, this issue is very complex, because any citizen who has a child will immediately point to the Constitution, but the federal law on the social contract, which was circulated to all subjects of the Russian Federation in 2015, is much better than the privileges and benefits that we provide today, based on each particular family, which are negligible.

The social contract is like a rod that we give to a family and we give an opportunity to solve their problems. We and the executive power in the regions attract extra budgetary sources of financing, we tighten all the programs. We have wonderful programs at the Center for Employment, which provide mothers with an opportunity to improve their skills. 

We propose to watch the latest federal laws at the regional level and ask the representatives of regions, which new regulations, new federal laws have come into force on their territory this year. There are laws to help a family, you just need to know in your region about it and see how they operate. That's the main problem.

To be continued