What is the criterion of need?

The new law on the provision of measures of social support entered into force on January 1st 2016. According to the document, regions received the right to independently develop criteria of need. However, within the framework of a round table titled ‘The criterion of need. Who will the state support?’ Lydia Ovcharova, director of the Social Policy Institute of the Higher School of Economics, made it clear that at the moment we did not have any legal instrument or a common scientific or practical understanding of what the criterion of need is, and what it includes or doesn't include."

“The topic of priority of social policy or a systematic principle of the social policy of assistance on the basis of need has been raised over the last 20 years. We have a legal framework for defining poverty, but we don’t know what need is. Are those people who really have some kind of need which cannot be resolved without the help of the state, or are those people with certain merits before the state, regardless of whether they have this need or not?” Ovcharova wonders.

According to her, “for a long time we followed the principle that those are people with certain merits before the state, who are confirmed by belonging to a particular category. Labor veterans, in particular. Because a labor veteran is a typical merit. This is a large group. And this group currently receives social assistance on the basis of belonging precisely to this group.”

According to Ovcharova, the second topic which has been inherited from the Soviet period is the fact that we provided benefits to many people as a replacement for low wages: “There is the story with rural teachers: we won't give you a salary, but we will give you benefits. We cannot say that our poor and needy categories of the population are a priority for social policy. It's fuzzy, blurry. So this is the third time this question has been raised in my lifetime, that needy people should be a priority group. And this Law 388 has taken another step in this direction, so that people who are in need became a priority group. Therefore, it seems to me that the value of this law is, above all, in this. If society will come to a consensus that this is right, then perhaps, at the third attempt we will succeed.”