Additional elements, published notably in The Freeas well as a report from the SPP Social Integration still showed serious management problems, right?
Obviously. I’m coming there. The biggest problem revealed by the Social Integration SPP is the time taken to manage files. We are illegal because we do not respect the 30-day deadline for issuing an opinion. This is what is worrying, and which probably means that social workers cannot go as far as they should in analyzing the files. I was talking about naivety, but there is a question of time. And there we come back to the difficulty of recruiting social workers and the problem of budgetary resources. Anderlecht is the third poorest municipality in Belgium. We had to increase the CPAS allocation from 25 to 40 million euros in four years… And we have just released another million. It explodes.
The leak of the internal files of a former CPAS advisor confirms the extent of the dysfunctions and slippages at the Anderlecht CPAS
Does the overload of work justify the lightness with which certain files are handled?
Justify, no. I’m not excusing. But that explains. The assistants do not have time to analyze the files very far because they are overwhelmed. But if we do not respect the thirty-day deadline, the SPP Social Integration has informed us that it will no longer reimburse us for the federal part of the aid granted (i.e. 70%, 30% payable by the municipality).
Beyond the heavy accusations weighing on the Anderlecht CPAS, when will we take an interest in the social workers who are expressing their distress?
It is the CSSS (the special social service council), made up of political representatives, which ultimately decides on the granting of aid. Shouldn’t these social action advisors be more severe, rejecting more insufficiently substantiated cases?
Yes. But that goes back to the mission of the advisors. Is it their mission to read thousands of files? It’s a debate. The Pano show talked about cronyism. But social workers rightly criticize the fact that their decisions are too often overturned by agents.
You get away with it by rejecting the accusation of cronyism by the fact that decisions are reformed. The former president of the CPAS, Mustapha Akouz (PS), assumed a form of clientelism in the VRT.
What he said was that he helped people, and if you called it cronyism, he was proud of it. No one denies that this formulation was unfortunate.
Scandal at the Anderlecht CPAS: PS “clientelism” attacked from all sides
Have some files not received preferential treatment from the CSSS?
What is the problem? As the CPAS processes files late and there are high expectations from the people concerned, they contact the agents if they do not receive a response from the services. When we meet people, we try to help them, to guide them. But their file will not go through any faster. No agent will ever ask for aid to be granted without respecting the allocation rules.
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