Suppose your father dies abroad, or you want to support your family after an earthquake, as was the case in Turkey in February. Anyone who receives unemployment benefits still loses their right to it if they travel for a calamity – which often entails additional costs. The law does not state emergency leave.
It is one of the many problems that the UWV experiences when implementing schemes. In a bottleneck letter sent on Wednesday, the organization and the Social Insurance Bank (SVB) urge Ministers Karien van Gennip (Social Affairs and Employment, CDA) and Carola Schouten (Poverty Policy, ChristenUnie) to simplify legislation and systems, and ask them to a long-term solution to problems that currently put people in difficult situations.
“It often concerns Kafkaesque legislation,” says UWV director Nathalie van Berkel. Rules that were once devised with good intentions, but in some cases turn out to be counterproductive. For example, someone on unemployment benefits cannot stop receiving benefits if they find a job with a wage lower than 85 percent
of the amount of the benefit – not even if that is sufficient for that person. “Formally you still have an obligation to apply, while you have found a nice job,” says Van Berkel. The UWV does not keep track of how often it occurs, “but our employees have seen this come back regularly for years.”
‘Christmas tree to child schemes’
The SVB spends just as she did in the previous two years, in the letter, attention is paid to the complexity of the allowances that parents can apply for for their child. The two largest child schemes are child benefit, a monthly fixed amount, and the child-related budget, which is income-related and consists of an advance. They must be applied for at various counters: the child benefit at the SVB, the child-related budget at the Toeslagen. About a million parents in the Netherlands are entitled to the child budget in addition to child benefit. However, approximately 70,000 parents do not apply for the money, partly as a result of the complex regulations and fear of having to repay advances afterwards. Sometimes they get into financial trouble because of this.
“We are looking for a long-term solution with politicians,” says SVB chairman Simon Sibma. “We have a Christmas tree of child arrangements. One has often been seized quickfix, but that has made implementation more and more complicated.” This also has consequences in the organization of the UWV and SVB, says Van Berkel: “The unemployment benefit is one of the simplest schemes that we implement, and the internal training for this has already taken a year.” Simplifying the legislation will therefore not only help citizens, but also the authorities themselves: they can free up their staff for other activities.
Reassessment
In the letters, UWV and SVB also mention examples of bottlenecks that are now being addressed, after they were submitted to the minister in previous years. For example, the UWV simplified the socio-medical reassessment of people over 60, in order to make up for backlogs in initial medical examinations in the event of long-term illness. The SVB arranged for the cost-sharing standard to be raised from 21 to 27, so that a parent with a child living at home who turns 21 and still lives at home is no longer suddenly confronted with a reduction in the elderly or survivor’s benefit to which he is entitled.
In recent years, due to the Supplementary Affair, politicians in The Hague have paid more attention to problems that arise in the implementation of legislation and regulations. The advantages and disadvantages of alternatives to the allowance system must be worked out in the spring of 2024, after which the question is when a new, simpler system will actually be introduced. Sibma does have the idea that politicians recognize the need for a system change: “As service providers, we cannot always continue to solve everything with customization.”