A new month, new rules. For example, from June 1, cigars and pipe tobacco will also have to be in neutral packaging and the right to be forgotten will be further expanded. Only contractual staff will be recruited at the railways. Home nurses are testing a new payment system. An overview.
Journalist at HLN
Source: Belga
From June 1, all tobacco and herbal smoking products placed on the market must be in neutral packaging. This should help make the products less attractive, especially for children and young people.
Plain packaging has been the rule for cigarettes, rolling tobacco, hookah tobacco and some other products for some time. The packaging should have a neutral background color and should not contain any logos, bold colors or brand symbols. There are also restrictions on mentioning the brand name.
From June, the rules also apply to cigars, cigarillos, pipe tobacco, devices (such as pipes, water pipes and devices for smoking CBD), papers, filters and sleeves.
Products in non-neutral packaging may still be available in stores for several months. After all, there is a transition period for traders.
“Due to the sober and uniform design, the image that brands try to build through their packaging disappears,” says the federal government service of Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment. “In addition, the health warnings on the packaging will receive more attention.”
From June 1, the right to be forgotten will be further expanded. The reporting obligation for previous cancer conditions will disappear and trip cancellation insurance will also be covered by the scheme from now on. This is confirmed by Assuralia, the professional association of the insurance sector.
The right to be forgotten has existed since 2019 for taking out outstanding balance insurance: people with a chronic condition or former cancer patients experienced great difficulty in taking out such insurance or had to pay a high premium.
Since 2019, the insurer may no longer take medical conditions into account in the risk assessment when treatment has been successfully completed. Depending on the disease, the right starts ten, five or one year after treatment. A number of chronic conditions are also covered by the scheme, provided they are under control.
Until now, former patients still had to state in their insurance applications that they had suffered from cancer in the past. This reporting obligation has now been abolished.
Users of service vouchers no longer have to check whether their service vouchers are in danger of expiring unused. From June 1, these service checks will be automatically refunded.
The automatic refund applies to service vouchers that expire on June 1 or later. For service vouchers that have previously expired and are not used, the old arrangement applies: the user must request a refund before the expiry date. Otherwise they will not be refunded.
For the automatic refund, the user’s personal information, such as account number, must be entered correctly in the user’s ‘My Citizen Profile’. Service vouchers are valid for twelve months.
Just over a thousand home nurses will be testing a new financing method from June. They are paid per hour instead of per performance.
According to the National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance (Riziv), a new financing system is needed for home care because it is “confronted with a high workload and a system in which valuable efforts are not sufficiently rewarded”. For example, certain care tasks are not paid for in the current system.
A total of 58 home nursing practices are participating in the pilot project. About half of that group will test out the new system. They are paid per hour and travel time is also reimbursed. The other half of the practices, with more than 900 home nurses, are monitored as a control group.
The pilot project will last two years. “Based on the results, a future financing model will be further developed,” the Riziv said.
Reimbursement for the HPV vaccine Gardasil9, which can protect against cervical cancer, among other things, will be expanded. From June, the repayment will be valid for up to 30 years.
The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a highly contagious virus that is transmitted through sexual contact and contracted by almost everyone. Although the body usually clears the virus itself, long-term infection can lead to six types of cancer, including cervical, anal and throat cancer. It is estimated that HPV is responsible for approximately 5 percent of all cancers.
According to Minister of Health Frank Vandenbroucke (Vooruit), vaccination offers effective protection against the most dangerous HPV types. The Gardasil9 vaccine is already reimbursed for young people aged 12 to 18 years; From June, young adults between 19 and 30 years old who have not previously been vaccinated will be added. For high-risk groups, such as HIV patients, patients after a stem cell transplant and patients for an organ transplant, reimbursement applies up to the age of 45.
The vaccine costs more than 120 euros and requires three doses. Thanks to the reimbursement, the patient only pays 12.8 euros per injection. Vandenbroucke expects that the expansion will result in approximately 60,000 additional vaccines being administered every year. He provides approximately 6 million euros for this.
From June 1, 2026, civil servants will be affiliated with the health and disability insurance instead of the health pension. As a result, permanently appointed civil servants who are absent due to a long-term illness can only be sent on a temporary medical pension. It is therefore no longer a definitive measure. By stopping the new influx, the government wants to extinguish the system completely in the long term.
According to figures from CD&V MP Nahima Lanjri, 86,911 civil servants are on permanent sick pension this year. Last year this involved 87,806 civil servants, at a cost of 2.5 billion euros per year. In 2024, 2,881 people entered the system, including young civil servants. In addition, at the beginning of 2025, 234 people were still on temporary sick pension, worth more than 6 million euros per year.
From June, the list of products that consumers can purchase with eco vouchers will be expanded again. For example, food and textile products with a fair trade label can be purchased with these cheques. The same applies to products from the sea with an ASC label: this indicates sustainable cultivation.
In addition, there is an adjustment to the electrical products. From June, the ‘energy-friendly electrical’ label will include household refrigeration appliances of class A, B or C, dishwashers of class A and washer-dryer combinations of class A, B or C. These can therefore also be paid for with eco vouchers. The changes were decided by the National Labor Council, which includes unions and employers.
From June 1, only contractual staff will be recruited at the railways. Statutory recruitments are a thing of the past.
The measure is part of the plans of Minister of Mobility Jean-Luc Crucke (Les Engagés) to modernize personnel policy at the railways. In concrete terms, this concerns the NMBS, rail network operator Infrabel and legal employer HR Rail.
The railway staff is currently largely appointed by statute: of the approximately 27,000 employees, approximately 88 percent are statutory. But from now on, all new employees will receive a normal employment contract. “There are no exceptions to this. From June 1, there will only be contractual recruitment,” says Dieter Vangeel, spokesperson for HR Rail.
The modernization operation also involves a reform of HR Rail, normally from January 1, 2027. HR Rail will remain the legal employer of rail staff, but the ‘recruitment & selection’ and ‘training’ powers will shift to NMBS and Infrabel. They will therefore be able to recruit and train staff themselves.
From June, newborns will also be screened for the life-threatening immune disease SCID (Severe Combined Immunodeficiency). Initially, SCID was going to be screened from 2023, but that expansion was postponed several times.
Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, is a serious immune disorder that can cause small children to die young from infections. Screening via a heel prick is not mandatory, but more than 99 percent of newborns receive the heel prick.
The blood from the heel prick is now tested for eighteen diseases. This concerns fourteen hereditary metabolic diseases, cystic fibrosis, a congenital muscle disease and two hormone diseases. All these diseases are rare, but treatable. They are already present at birth, but not visible. The longer you wait before treatment, the worse the damage.
