In his last annual report as the defender of rights, Jacques Toubon alert on the state of public services and their accessibility. Published on Monday, the report of activity of the defender to 2019 responsibility on the “difficult access to public services”, and pointed out that the large increase (+78.4% of them from 2014, with 61.596 claims identified in 2019) of the complaints related to public services received by their teams proves “the magnitude of the deleterious effects of the evanescence of the public services about the rights of users”. “The progressive disappearance of public services open to various public and accessible causes anxiety and feeling of abandonment. Many of our fellow our citizens have the feeling of being forgotten,” says the deputy in charge of the fight against discrimination and the promotion of equality, Patrick Gohet.
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If the increase in the number of complaints received in this area is less spectacular than the bond of 178,8% in six years for claims related to the “ethics and security”, the requests generated by the relations with the public services still constitute the lion’s share of the work of the public defender of rights, or 57% of the total complaints received in 2019. Comprising nearly one-quarter of the claims, the social protection bodies such as the FCA (9.4% of claims), social Security (4.5 per cent) or unemployed (2.6 per cent) are the most implicated. These are followed by the prefectures and sub-prefectures (11.7%) and the territorial collectivities (8.5 per cent). Conversely, the services tax (5.1%), justice (4,8%), education or national security forces (1.7%) account for a relatively small proportion of claims.
The report draws up a balance sheet poor of the year : the precarious administrative, social rights were contested, territorial inequalities, negative effect of the dematerialization of the administration… “One person in five is experiencing difficulties in completing the administrative procedures common and more than half of the population has been facing difficulties to solve a problem with an administration or a public service in the five years preceding the survey” to 2020, notes the document. Among the causes for this decline in quality, the report cites in particular the closure of ticket offices, the dematerialization or “the decrease of financial means”.
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For the defender, the requirement of equality that we must ensure the public service is “less satisfied”. In detail, the regions Île-de-France (12,4 claims per 10,000 inhabitants), provencealpes-côte d’azur (12), Corsica (11,5) and Occitania (11,3) gather the most complaints reported to the number of inhabitants. Similarly, the overseas territories have reported significant discrimination in access to public services and the failures repeated. “Many testimonies have reported problems with schedules ticket office or platforms for the telephone, waiting times, processing times of file or error committed by the administrative services”, says the report, which also points to the low coverage of the internet network in these territories so that the cloud takes off.
difficulties in responding “to the requests of the most simple users”
Result : the services are finding it increasingly difficult to respond to users ‘ requests, even for the “simplest” of them. In the field of judiciary, for example, “many users of the public service in the justice encounter difficulties in obtaining a response to their request or their request for information on the status of their procedure. Parquet courts do not have sufficient resources in personnel to inform victims within a reasonable time of the decision taken as a result of their complaints”, validates the document. Another example is the legal deadlines for transmission of the medical record to a patient are not always respected, and “the patient is still experiencing difficulties to obtain the communication of his entire medical record”.
the degradation of the quality of public services puts at risk the fundamental rights of vulnerable people,” warns Jacques Toubon, who cites the example of the poor management of addictions in people detained or “some of the facts of abuse in structures médicosociales”, as the “non-respect of privacy, lack of hygiene, the obstacles to the freedom to come and go”.
A warning consistently for the past several years
The decline of public services was pointed out many years ago by the human rights defender : in march 2019, the institution wrote that the public services are victims of “evanescence growing”, at the national and local levels. “Remote”, “indented”, “unable to manage complex situations” and poorly sited on the territory, they no longer meet the needs of the users, will die too often in the silence and shut down gradually, victims of a logic of economy budget. “In many cases, the difficulties that must be overcome” users like “least failures that barriers” put in place “more or less deliberately by the public authorities”, wondered the report, to such an extent that these genoa successive dig the distance between users and public authorities and complicate significantly the life of citizens. “The user must now demonstrate an ability to “get by” in our administrative work,” noted the report.
at the same time, another document comes back on the claims received during the health crisis of the last few months. During this period, the defender and his representatives have identified 870 cases “involving the rights and freedoms in the relations with the public services in connection with the health crisis”. During this period, the closure of post offices, in particular, posed a problem “for people in precarious and vulnerable, asking for the payment of social welfare grants to which they may be entitled by warrant to the major people under guardianship who are forced, for lack of a bank card, withdraw the benefits that they receive at the atm and for people who, because of their disability, cannot access”, highlights the study.
The editorial team conseilleServices public : strong feeling of degradation among the users and the agentsComment Emmanuel Macron wants to restructure public services on the terrainSujetsJacques ToubonDéfenseur of droitsservices publicsAucun comment
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