According to a recent report of the National Council for the Fight against Poverty and Social Exclusion (the CNLE), the consequences of the reorganizations carried out on the occasion of the health crisis are now visible. The members of the CNLE point in particular to the extreme speed of the digitization of public services (85% of the objective under the Macron era has been achieved).
Scanning too fast?
With the health crisis, the public authorities have been forced to reorganize and above all to restrict the physical reception of French people, in many administrations. To deal with this situation, the government has notably had to speed up the digitization of several administrative procedures. According to the barometer of the National Council for the Fight against Poverty, this strategy would have distanced certain users, in particular those who need them most, from essential services.
Samsung increases the price of its semiconductors by 20%
The precarious and deprived people are obviously concerned in the foreground by this exclusion due to digitization. In its report, the CNLE explains that “dematerialization, in fact, is synonymous with a drastic regression in the terms of access to public services and especially with a physical reception. The CNLE working groups have all noted these access difficulties”. The members of the Council give a few examples of operations to the detriment of users: “on the CPAM site, you can’t change anything, you have to write on a messaging system and then respond to messages by post, it’s a real waste of time”.
A tension in society
In parallel with the publication of the barometer, the National Council for the Fight against Poverty unveiled a “qualitative monitoring” of poverty which makes it possible to understand the social effects of the pandemic and the economic consequences of brutal inflation emerged in the first quarter of 2022. Between October 2021 and February 2022, the CNLE interviewed 128 actors in the field throughout France (social workers, associations fighting against exclusion, managers of accommodation structures, workshops and construction sites integration, banking networks), Pôle Emploi, etc. The results show that they all agree in noting “a rise in public aggressiveness”.
They are part of a tension in societywhich they link, according to the CNLE barometer, to “difficulties in accessing rights, in dialogue with the administration, in the absence of interlocutors able to hear their difficulties”. Digitization is therefore directly pointed out. A recent INSEE study published on May 11, 2022 confirms that “32% of adults, but 53% of disadvantaged people, have given up on carrying out an online administrative procedure (application for social housing, a place in a crèche and above all for social benefits, due to its complexity”.