They had taken everything out of the communication closet for the occasion: Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) and State Secretary Hans Vijlbrief (Mining, D66) had boarded the official car to Groningen. They did not want to give their reaction to the hard conclusions of the parliamentary committee of inquiry about the years of failure in Groningen gas extraction from the distant The Hague – but at the place where the Rutte cabinets had consciously looked away for a decade, creating a “disastrous situation”.
For that government response, presented on April 25, they had come up with a title in Groningen: New started, a new beginning. The document kicks off with a poem about the “craving” that “we can look back on these days and say, ‘then everything changed.'”
In its own words, the cabinet wants to “use this last opportunity to do better”, and has presented fifty concrete measures to this end. But for people who have been experiencing the consequences of the earthquakes for years, expectations appear to be very low. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will debate the government’s response.
“They show again that they are lord and master of the charm offensive,” says Susan Top. She was secretary of the Groninger Gasberaad, a collective of social organizations that for many Groningen residents became the face of the fight against The Hague, and has now been nominated by BBB as a deputy. Top has “very little confidence in that the fifty cabinet measures will improve much for Groningen residents”.
“I think that these new measures will only increase the differences between people,” says Jolanda Jager-Smit, a resident of ‘t Zandt, a village that has been turned into a construction site due to the many damage repair and reinforcement operations. She also lives in a house that has damage and should be reinforced. But the lingering bureaucratic processes have made her so weak that she prefers not to do it.
Improvement has been promised so many times. And just like now, say Top and Jager-Smit, then all kinds of measures were proposed to better arrange damage repair and reinforcement of Groningen homes. The result was usually more confusion among residents, more mistrust between neighbors who suddenly came under different rules, and more bickering between the many government agencies dealing with damage and reinforcement.
Read more about the government’s response here: Cabinet promises recovery and prospects for gas extraction area – but allocates fewer billions than hoped
Unwanted differences
It won’t be any different this time, both women think. Look at the signs: the cabinet wrote that when devising the measures it “has made grateful use of the many suggestions” from, among others, the Mining Damage Institute (IMG). But this IMG, which handles earthquake damage on behalf of the cabinet, and therefore has to implement the new measures, stated that “some measures lead to new undesirable differences, higher implementation costs and in some cases do not achieve the intended goal”.
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Photo Kees van de Veen
The IMG is particularly critical of the most important government measure to speed up claims handling: residents with damages of up to 40,000 euros are no longer bothered with investigations and discussions about whether that damage was caused by earthquakes. According to the IMG, such discussions will be replaced by discussions about the extent of the damage: will people pay for peeling paint, for example, which is clearly not caused by earthquakes? And is all damage compensated, or part? And precisely residents with serious and complex damage to their home, who suffer the most from the situation, are “very limited to no help”.
Jager-Smit can confirm that: “People who have damage up to 40,000 euros are now suddenly reimbursed, without the burden of proof. But in the core area, where there is really major damage, you do absolutely nothing with such an amount.” Also, nothing is done for people who in the past were only compensated for part of the damage or reinforcement and then paid for it themselves. “They are not getting any compensation now.”
According to Top, the fact that the cabinet is announcing a measure that is directly criticized by the organization that has to implement it is “not very encouraging”. What adds to the confusion is that this month the IMG itself also made proposals for better claims handling that “have no formal status whatsoever”, but according to Top, are already seen as new policy by some victims. “It really is,” says Top, “a mindfuck for residents.”
The IMG now gives victims the opportunity to postpone a decision on the settlement of their damage, pending clarity about the new policy. It is symptomatic of an administrative culture in which the implementation of new plans is secondary. While it is precisely this implementation for residents that is the most important.
Also read this analysis of the survey report: Consciously looking away from the problems in Groningen is symbolic of the Rutte era
Grumbling along
According to Tom Postmes, professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen, the IMG’s criticism illustrates one of the main causes of the problems in Groningen: “The authorities and governments involved rarely agree on the course to take.”
Postmes spent years researching the social consequences of earthquakes. “The conclusion of the committee of inquiry was: all those parties in the system did not work well together, and that resulted in a terrible mess.” The curve is, according to Postmes, that the committee then “made a kind of U-turn and said that this malfunctioning system had to remain the same because a system change could turn out even worse”. Even though the cabinet has promised billions extra to Groningen, Postmes doubts whether “all those authorities and organizations will soon be whistling through one door”.
Look at the “particularly poor working relationship between the national government and the region,” says Postmes. The government has announced that from now on the various layers of government will work more closely together. Postmes: “In the run-up to this government response, we have not yet noticed any of this. On the contrary. We had never before seen the region go public with the announcement: there must be 30 billion. And then reacted grumblingly to what was added, that was not enough.”
“In all those years, the regional administrators have never really stood their ground against the government, and then they are now acting so indignant,” says public administration expert Wim Derksen. He led six ‘open dialogue’ in Groningen, in which scientists, citizens and administrators talked to each other about the earthquakes. Derksen considers this ‘grumbling along’ of the provincial administrators with residents to be gratuitous. “They could also have said: now it is over, if a solution is not found soon, we will no longer cooperate with government policy.” According to him, that could have been fine: “Just look at how some provinces are now refusing to implement the nitrogen policy.”
Debt of honor
The government wants to scatter 22 billion euros over Groningen – money that had already been promised in part. Those involved are also skeptical about this: it will not speed up claims handling and reinforcement.
“Of course you can open the money tap, but without a vision it will not help,” says a former official who was involved in the reinforcement operation. He still helps Groningers with stuck files. For them, he sees no improvement “by far” yet. In his view, adding new rules to a system that is not working is a hopeless path. “As long as you don’t give room to help individual residents freely and bravely with the problems they raise, you won’t get any further.”
“Money is not going to solve the problem,” Derksen also thinks. He fears that it will be fragmented over “hundreds of projects that were already partly in the pipeline”, just as happened with the ‘billion from Max’ (van den Berg, then commissioner of the king) that Groningen received in 2014. “It is all crumb work, because everyone must have something.”
Rutte expresses himself everywhere
Jolanda Jager-Smit duped
Motion of distrust
The fact that the cabinet resigns because of ‘Groningen’ does not appear to be a likely scenario. While, according to Derksen, “a motion of no confidence should receive the support of the full Chamber”. For years, the relationship between gas extraction and earthquakes was deliberately concealed and the reinforcement of unsafe houses did not get off the ground. “The cabinet is responsible for all this misery.”
The government’s defense is that the system is too complicated and therefore does not work. But systems never fail, says Top. “It’s the people who make the systems that can fail.” Everything that happened in Groningen was ‘product of human action’. The fundamental question that the Netherlands should ask itself is whether it is a country where “even after inflicting and then knowingly ignoring so much suffering, no politician takes responsibility”.
“Rutte talks out everywhere,” expects Jager-Smit. Vijlbrief will also stay put, she thinks, “because Groningen wants him so badly”. She herself is skeptical about his performance: “I have not yet heard a single solution from him. That 50-point plan doesn’t come close. In fact, you only make the problems worse.”
Read also: Rutte said sorry about nothing so often as about Groningen