The 2025 budget must push the State to make savings. 40 billion are expected. Local authorities will be involved. The Somme Departmental Council estimates the effort at 24 million euros.
Presented this week to the Council of Ministers, then to the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, the 2025 State budget is established in a more than complicated context. With weak growth, revenues will not be there. The state must make savings. And also count on local communities for this.
With this project, the Departments must assume the dynamics of social spending, while seeing themselves cut off part of their revenue.
Faced with these threats to their budgets, the Departments are warning about the scale of the effort required. Tomorrow, the Departments will no longer be able to cope with the explosion in their expenses – particularly solidarity – imposed by the State. In the event of full application of the announced measures, 85% of them would find themselves in serious difficulty by the end of 2025.
What impact on the 2025 budget of the Somme?
Building on these first elements, even if Parliament will try to improve the budget model for local authorities by the end of the year, it is now assured that the balance of the Departmental Council’s 2025 Budget project is upset. These unprecedented provisions will indeed require an unprecedented budgetary effort, both in operation and in investment, estimated at this stage at more than 24 million euros.
Among this effort, the obligation to set aside revenues (3 billion euros in 2025 for 450 communities at the national level), on the basis of 2% of those planned for 2025, already represents, for the Department of the Somme, almost 14 million euros less. Added to this in particular is the freezing of VAT revenue (impact of nearly 3.5 million euros) but also a reduction in the compensation fund for value added tax (FCTVA), participation in the reduction of the deficit of the CNRACL (without known details on the modalities), without forgetting the still announced drop in transfer taxes (notary fees / DMTO).
“An untenable situation”
For Stéphane Haussoulier, president of the Somme Departmental Council, “As of this week, I have informed all the Parliamentarians of the Somme about this untenable situation.
Today, the Departmental Council helps municipalities in their projects. And tomorrow? Today, the Department takes proactive action on disability, the elderly, housing and child protection. And tomorrow? Today, the Department supports the purchasing power of families. And tomorrow?
All of these interventions are now under threat. Our mobilization must be total for the Government to review its copy. The Departments need a reform of their financing. I will play my full part in this, because it is not up to the Departments which manage their budgets soundly to foot the bill for the State. Is this a disguised guardianship? The question is there. The Samarians should know this. »
“An unprecedented bloodletting”
The departmental Left also warns of the situation: “Unable to find credible sources of savings or to sufficiently increase its revenues, the government is planning an unprecedented cut in the budget of local authorities” write Angelo Tonolli, Julie Vast and Esra Ercan .
The three elected officials put into perspective: “24 million euros, this represents almost 3% of the Departmental Council’s expenditure in 2024. Concretely, it is the equivalent of the annual budget dedicated to investments in regional planning or for the operation of colleges. This decision endangers all departmental policies. It jeopardizes the meaning of our action.”
They too turn to Parliamentarians to prevent “the government to sacrifice the local authorities which are not responsible for the deficit in the accounts publics.“
