Tribune’s guest is a member of the Federation Council Committee on Social Policy, the senator from the Volgograd Region, Elena Popova.
- In spite of the crisis, the budget for 2016 was adopted without cutting the social component as a whole, they managed to keep it. How will the anti-crisis plan of the government in terms of support for families with many children be implemented?
- We would even consider the fact that it was not just adopted without cutting social items, but even with the support of increasing the size of transfers of the Russian Federation regions as our achievement. Unfortunately, we are aware that some regions are highly subsidized. We hope that the increased transfers will allow regions to implement the federal anti-crisis plan. We pay special attention to families with underage children, which need both state and regional support. Certain measures were taken to amend different laws in the past year in response to the federal anti-crisis plan.
Last year we added new ways of spending parent capital. We didn't wait for children to be three years old and families received an opportunity to use the funds for a down payment on a mortgage. This was also a wish from the regions. Just at the end of the year, we accepted another direction regarding the rehabilitation and habilitation of disabled children. And now we expect a government decree, on the basis of which pension funds in every region of the Russian Federation will start accepting applications from parents on the form of rehabilitation considered possible by parents and to agree with the decree proposed by the government. If we are talking about a family which has a disabled child, as a rule those measures are not enough.
‘Habilitation of persons with disabilities' is a brand new block of exactly the same set of measures as rehabilitation, but given the fact that we provide parents with an opportunity to spend maternal capital, we believe that we have secured a number of measures to improve the incomes of families with underage children.
Support for families with many children is linked with the adoption of the federal law on the introduction of the use of resources and targeting the criteria of need.
We carefully study and monitor all further requests of the regions on the subject of any new direction of parental capital means. We have a federal law on additional measures of state support for families with children in the Russian Federation. The regional legal framework should be harmonized with those wishes that we prescribe in the federal law. We do not impose additional obligations on the regions. We offer to implement all the new directions that have been proposed in the framework of the anti-crisis plan, on the basis of budget opportunities and their own extra-budgetary sources.
- The principle of targeting and application of the criteria of need is now causing the most complaints. Wasn't the aid targeted before?
- When Russia began to build the body of laws in support of the family and motherhood, childhood, elderly people and people with disabilities, legislators tried to register social support measures for as many categories as possible and in the greatest possible monetary terms. And as a result we got a skew from the regions, we began to receive complaints. We have a federal law called ‘On freedom of movement of citizens on the territory of the Russian Federation", which ensures that when a citizen moves from one region to the other, there should be no deterioration. But it was happening. And then we arrived at the idea of conducting social audit measures of support of all sorts of categories of citizens residing on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Oddly enough, we saw a very mixed picture. It was enough for any citizen of retirement age to relocate to the Volgograd region, and this was sufficient grounds to apply to the Social Welfare Department for the implementation of payments and to obtain ‘labor veteran’ status. They did not look at any age limit or the number of years that the employee had worked at the company, they issued the status of a veteran to everybody, as well as all relevant payments. This residency requirement was considered by other regions – when we want to fill up our own personal income tax base, respectively, we expect that a person has to work on our territory, to pay taxes in order to receive this status upon retirement.
When we started to bring the social support measures into compliance, we realized that we cannot constantly inflate the budget, imposing additional obligations of a social nature, constantly expanding the category of beneficiaries, and constantly improving the amount of financial expenditure. No region can cope with this. Therefore, since last summer all the regions were connected to this audit and started to recheck their benefits.
Today we have a social code, which will operate on the territory of our region in 2016. It is very well designed, so that we separated all these categories of beneficiaries into five groups. Every citizen, opening his chapter, may find for himself and attribute to himself to one category or another, read exactly the set of laws that allows benefits and measures of social support in relation to him.
A financial base should be established in advance, and you need to tell the young people that if they want to get good pensions when they are elderly, then they must not only have the experience, but also the pension points.
We expect a decision from the Russian Government which will put things right, there will be no misunderstandings or different interpretations in the constituent parts of the Russian Federation, it will be clearly defined on what grounds and on what criteria this family can be attributed as being poor.
The declared nature of social support measures must be supported by a more objective document. Making a lot of amendments to the Family Code, we have made it possible for young people to lobby their interests and generate higher revenues. In particular, there is such a category as a single mother. Young people take the opportunity not to register a marriage, and on the basis of a civil marriage have a joint household, have children together, but they still manage to receive twice the size of benefits for a child. We believe that it is not fair to the rest of the mothers.
The experience of the Belgorod region is interesting. During the registration of social support measures, the region takes a statement from the family that citizens are not against a visit by the commission of social protection department for the audit of housing conditions, conversations with neighbors and identification of instances of misreporting.
A family which lives in a three-storey mansion and has two foreign cars in their courtyard cannot come for registration for child allowance.
In 2015 we were actively discussing law 442 'On the basis of social services to citizens on the Russian Federation territory'. After the adoption of this law, in the same way, we gave the right to the regions to maneuver between their sizes of minimum wage, which are adopted in specific territories, between those categories of benefit recipients, which they could extend up to two sheets using their own funds, just as the Novosibirsk region did, or increase it by eight categories, just as the Volgograd region did. That is why if we say that someone is left behind, it is not true. An increasing coefficient of 1.5 minimum wage rates on privileged categories was adopted on the territory of the Volgograd region. It is much more, and let's say that those pensioners, older people, who have not received social services for free before that, in 2015 they began to receive them on the basis of law number 442. Therefore, when we start to work on the law on criteria of need and targeting, in parallel we will work on law 442, which any region can edit in 2016, just like they could in 2015.
- To what extent, in the framework of the federal law, can we demand a universal approach to provision of social assistance?
- The law is universal, and it is for the benefit of the regions. Once the regions began to conduct an audit of their measures of social support, they faced the fact that they could not overcome on their own territory. Every region has a number of documents, which the executive authorities fulfill on the basis of their normative and legal acts or regional laws. At the same time, there are laws that cannot be broken, as they are created for everyone. For example, the education law or the law on labor veterans, or the law on Chernobyl residents. And here, regions have faced the choice of when they can appeal to their local legislative assembly, so that the legislative assembly appealed to the State Duma with a legislative initiative, so that the State Duma added these amendments to the federal legislation into their work plans. As we understand, this process could take a year or more, so the State Duma Committee took over the powers and almost all the federal laws, which are currently prescribed in the text of the law on criteria of need and targeting, combined into one and separated into blocks. And after adopting one law, we liberated the regions from normative, legislative work, and also allowed them to reduce the measures for implementation of the law that we have already adopted.
We have adopted the measures on criteria of need with the amendment "regions can." The only thing that was not implemented was a commitment in relation to the inhabitants of Chernobyl. The law has different deadlines for implementation of this or that direction. We asked to postpone the implementation for Chernobyl residents to July of 2016, or even to January of 2017 the interpretation of territories classified as polluted, less polluted, completely clean, has not been completed by the regions to date. This process is very long, very expensive. This is a question of a social character, since the mothers didn't receive the same child support payments as the rest of the mothers in the Russian Federation. Today we tried to link payments to the age of children – one figure up to 3 years, and another amount after 3 years.
However, it still won't be enough. So during the adoption of this law in the Federation Council in December of 2015, we asked to give the protocol commission, so that we carried out monitoring of this law. Feedback is very important for us. It is important to understand what is happening in the regions that have such zones of pollution. And on the other hand, we must understand how correct the work that we have completed is on assigning or transferring the territory from one zone to another. If medical experts say that the process of secondary disease in adolescence is not decreasing, but increasing, we must not stop or reduce payments. The issue is so complex that it cannot be solved without the healthcare system. Assignment of the territory to this or that category cannot be finished without doctors and without the profile committee of the Emergencies Ministry. So we are monitoring the assignment of Chernobyl residents.
Regions were supposed to understand where they will take resources to provide medical care from secondary diseases in the zone, which was previously considered to be polluted, for children in their teens.
If we speak about the law 'On education', we delegated the right to apply the principle of targeting and need in respect of those citizens who have a legal right to send a child to a kindergarten as compensation. We didn't change the law itself, neither in the last edition of law 273 nor in the current one; we suggested an interpretation on the basis of the compensation which our parents knew for a long time and they got used to it. The first child is 20%, the second is 50%, and the third is 70%. But we gave regions the right to regulate their relations with their mothers. If the budget allows it, they can pay compensation in the previous volume as before, after the mothers' applications. If a region does not have enough funds to pay off other social items, the regions have a right to apply the criteria of targeting and need, i.e. they can revise families' incomes.
So here we are hoping for the activities of the public regional chambers, that we are subjects of the same public control with such instances of change, or violation, or a number of addresses of citizens to track and allow. We are discussing a unified information database. Certainly, we must trust the regions, but at the same time we must re-examine. It is federal money. As soon as we have a region requesting a certain amount, it should render an account. We should re-examine the number of families in a unified information database to whom social support measures were provided. The database should be ready by 2018.
Today the Pension Fund stopped working with children with disabilities. They also received social support measures. So we hope to create a cross interaction of all funds – the Pension Fund, the Social Insurance Fund, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, specialized committees or regional departments – that will allow us to create the resources that we need. We need not only to count those who receive our services, but also to understand whether the work of the state is enough. Is it correct? Does it expand with the help of cash flows, or does it narrow?
We have some pilot projects in regions on the same social contract, which show good results. A family doesn't receive the same amount all the time that can’t help them to solve their problems; they receive a good opportunity to get out of this financially difficult situation and start earning themselves. And these social contracts are the most interesting aspect of all the social support measures.
It is necessary to monitor what financial savings it allows you to obtain for the regions, as well as replicate it in other regions. Mechanisms of assistance to the family, both methods and techniques, will be reflected in this database. And then it will be clear from the federal government how much finances we have allocated to some regions, where the situation is more or less the same, and where it is better or worse. We won't forget or lose anybody, because we have other laws in parallel that we didn't cancel. We are running them, but the law on the criteria for targeting and need will be beneficial for the regions which began to develop this interaction.
We appeal to all social units in the region once again: we need to review all laws, all measures of social support, and in the framework of the anti-crisis plan of the government, and in the context of the work of both chambers, which we accepted to support motherhood, childhood, elderly people and especially people with disabilities. We prolonged ‘The Accessible Environment’, and separately we accepted law 419 in a new edition. All regions will send their own roadmaps that they are to implement in 2016 for changing their infrastructure for the benefit of people with disabilities. And now we do not accept objections of the regions that they cannot do this, because they started doing this in accordance with roadmaps approved and developed by themselves. We understand that tomorrow Braille signs and additional traffic lights won't appear everywhere, but at the same time, each person knows that he must do it within a certain period. The policy of the regions should be developed properly in cooperation with the regional public chambers, non-governmental organizations, and always with public organizations of disabled people.
