“The coming crisis? It keeps me from sleeping on weekends“, says a minister based in Bercy, at the heart of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance.”No one saw the twelve months of ‘yellow vests’ coming, recalls the same, but here it is not incongruous to think that something is going to happen. “
When one of his colleagues is asked about the state of the country next spring, a long silence sets in. “If we have Bridgestones in series, it will be problematic“blows this minister. Bridgestone, the tire factory in Bethune in the Pas-de-Calais, which will close next year, leaving 863 employees on the floor.
The worst-case scenario for the executive? Bubbling neighborhoods, whose anger converges with that of the new poor. To avoid this, the government is acquiring a new toolbox to measure the rise of weak signals in real time.
This can be unpaid rents, unreimbursed loans, recourse to food banks, the number of beneficiaries of RSA or solidarity complementary health, aid distributed according to household income.
On unpaid rents, an observatory has just been installed by the Minister of Housing, Emmanuelle Wargon, who felt a feverishness in the sector – private and social landlords, real estate agencies, associations. The minister realized that there was no body that centralizes and consolidates all the data, to know how many households are lacking.
The role of this observatory will be to establish a dashboard each month. The subject is central: today’s arrears are tomorrow’s evictions, at the end of the winter break on March 31.
A second tool will be launched next Tuesday, supported by the National Council for the fight against poverty and exclusion. This state body must manage a second dashboard, which brings together all the other indicators.
Of course, associations are already producing this data, as is INSEE. Except that their studies are done over the long term. The figures are not compiled in real time, not crossed with other data. The National Council for the Fight against Poverty will put them around the table, along with other actors in the social field such as the Family Allowance Funds, for example, to speed up the reporting of information, to identify more quickly “holes in the racket and knowing where to deploy the safety nets“as Emmanuelle Wargon sums it up.
