Poverty according to uniform rules – Newspaper Kommersant No. 53 (7498) of 03/29/2023

The government plans to expand the community-friendly principles that currently provide benefits to families with children aged three to seven to other types of social assistance. A draft law on this has been submitted to the State Duma for consideration. The most ambitious of the proposed measures will be the unification of the rules for calculating need when concluding social contracts, which are now used by 5% of poor citizens.

The bill developed by the Ministry of Labor and submitted to the State Duma proposes to unify the conditions for providing social support to the poor. A large number of measures will be available for claims that currently provide benefits to families with children between the ages of three and seven. Recall that families in which the average per capita income is less than the subsistence minimum per person in the region can apply for this type of assistance. At the same time, the family includes the applicant, his spouse, minor children, as well as children under the age of 23 if they are studying full-time.

Social contracts are now also concluded taking into account the need (the average per capita income does not exceed the subsistence level, but in this case the concept of a household is used, not a family. As a result, all citizens registered in an apartment, including adult relatives, are taken into account. For example, if a family with a child is registered in an apartment parents of one of the spouses, then all of them are taken into account when calculating the means indicator.

The bill proposes to eliminate this difference and move to the calculation of need taking into account the income of family members, and not the entire household. As the Ministry of Labor explained to Kommersant, the transition to such a calculation procedure will make the social contract more accessible, and will also allow it to be concluded without collecting certificates. The department clarified that they do not plan to extend the “zero income rule” and requirements for property security, which are taken into account when assigning child benefits, to this type of social assistance. The duration of the billing period when taking into account family income will also remain the same – three months.

The social contract is the most ambitious measure among those that are affected by the introduced bill. In 2022, the federal budget spent almost 30 billion rubles. to finance 276 thousand social contracts with a total coverage of 868 thousand people (in 2021 – 23 billion rubles for 282 thousand social contracts with coverage of 981 thousand people). Most often (in 40% of cases) they conclude a social contract for the purpose of employment, this allows them to receive four payments in the amount of the subsistence minimum.

A change in the approach to accounting for the income of applicants for a social contract is likely to increase their number, although it is not yet possible to accurately predict the increase. This is probably why the Ministry of Labor in the explanatory note does not propose to increase the program budget for 2023 by 35 billion rubles. At the same time, the target indicators planned by the department should increase. In 2022, the share of those who signed a social contract out of the total number of poor citizens was 5%; the share of those whose average per capita income increased after its completion, 43%; those for whom it exceeded the subsistence minimum – 16%. In 2023, these figures should be 5.1%, 46% and 19%, respectively.

As Dmitry Platygin, director of the All-Russian Research Institute of Labor, notes, a social contract is a subtle tool for working with poverty. “It is designed for a rather narrow target group — those who have the potential to get out of poverty solely by realizing their own labor potential,” he says. As Andrei Nikitin, Governor of the Novgorod Region, notes, the initiative of the Ministry of Labor was discussed by experts from the State Council, and although not all of their proposals were taken into account in the final document, the project is in any case “a step towards defining common approaches for regional measures of social assistance.”

Anastasia Manuylova