Vive la différence: French minister explains why France is still a welfare state
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Version 0 of 1. While British politicians argue over just how austere the next stage of the austerity era will need to be, Laurence Rossignol, the French minister for the family, older people and adult care makes it clear that her government’s approach is very different. “France hasn’t entered the age of austerity,” she says. “We have made the choice to reduce our public expenditure and to encourage growth while at the same time maintaining solidarity and the welfare state. Social spending has not decreased in France. We are reducing other spending but we are not cutting spending on sickness, ageing or education. It is a choice.” Related: Few feel older people in the UK have a good quality of life, survey finds | Kate Murray It is this French drive for a “more sustainable welfare state, not less of a welfare state”, as Rossignol’s team puts it, that will see a new law passed this year to transform the way France addresses the challenges of an ageing society. Nicknamed the triple A law for its key themes of “anticipate, adapt and accompany”, the legislation will involve a significant increase in spending, starting at €650m (£480m) a year, funded by a new tax on pensions. The new money will be channelled into increasing the number of hours of homecare an older person receives and into upping the proportion the state pays for that care. It will also fund a new respite allowance of up to €500 (£364) per person a year to give carers a break and pay for adaptations in up to 80,000 homes by 2017. In London to meet ministers and to speak at a conference on ageing alongside NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens, Rossignol says she would have liked to go even further, spending more to help the French meet the costs of care homes. “If you wanted to do everything, I estimate it would cost €4bn (£2.9bn),” she says. “What I’d like to do, once we can, is to reduce the contribution people have to pay in care homes. Someone who spends 10 years in a care home can leave their house, all their savings as well as those of their children there.” But it is not just about spending more. In an approach which strikes a chord with the debate this side of the Channel on ageing well, Rossignol insists it is crucial to change the way society looks at older people. “We want every decision-maker when it comes to new policies to ask the question: ‘Will this decision make the life of older people in my town easier?’” Rossignol says. “People want to grow older in their own home but growing old at home shouldn’t mean being trapped at home – you need to be able to get out.” That means a fundamental shift in outlook, she suggests – not just tackling elder abuse, for example, but actively promoting positive treatment of older people across society. It might also mean confronting some thorny issues. “You need to consider the trade-offs between protection and the rights of the person, for example, with people who have Alzheimer’s and who have a tendency to wander off. How can you on the one hand protect them but at the same time not attack the fundamental freedom to come and go? It is judgments like that between rights and protection that one has to make all the time and I want to encourage professionals always to have that in mind.” We are thinking about the same things and the same approaches, but perhaps we could say France is still a welfare state Some of the French thinking mirrors UK priorities – and, indeed, Rossignol says shared concerns, such as preventing unnecessary hospital admissions, improving early diagnosis and end-of-life care were on the agenda in her discussions with the UK care and support minister Norman Lamb. She also saw some practical initiatives to help older people at Age UK Camden during her visit. But despite the shared priorities, the new French money to support more care at home and to develop care work as a more attractive career may well draw envious glances from campaigners here. Rossignol won’t be drawn too far on critiquing the UK approach, other than to say: “We are thinking about the same things and the same approaches but perhaps we could say France is still a welfare state; we are more at ease with public spending in these areas.” Both countries will need to support a growing proportion of older people in the decades to come: according to Global AgeWatch the proportion of over-60s in France is set to rise from 24.5% in 2014 to 31% in 2050, compared with a rise from 23.3% to 30.7% in the UK over the same period. But while France scores highly against the UK in the Global AgeWatch index for the relative wealth and health of its older population, its size presents particular challenges, especially when it comes to issues like a lack of public transport and isolation. The isolation issue is one policymakers clearly recognise and the new French reforms lay particular stress on tackling loneliness, with teams of citizen volunteers to reach out to older people and a national plan to prevent suicide among older people. Rossignol, a radical in her youth as a member of France’s Communist Revolutionary League before joining the Socialist party and a minister since last April, says she also wants to see organisations and businesses do more for older people. “Lots of sports clubs could develop activities for older people but they don’t because they don’t think about it and they’re not used to it. So this is a law that’s also about changing our behaviour,” she says. The French reforms include attempts to strengthen “inter-generational solidarity”, with everything from a new senior volunteer force to a national day for schoolchildren and older people to swap experiences, and a new quality mark to promote housing schemes where old and young live alongside each other providing mutual support. Rossignol’s ministerial brief is itself an inter-generational one, covering as it does the family as well as older people, and she has a favourite analogy for her own perspective. “I like to say that the family is like a block of flats in which there’s a generation on each floor and in which women go up and down the stairs from the bottom floor to the top between the different generations,” she says. “My two ambitions are to install lifts to help women – and to get men on to the stairs more often.” Could the inter-generational focus be helpful as France bids to bring society together in the wake of the attacks in Paris at the start of the year? Certainly, Rossignol says solidarity between generations can be a positive force in tackling discrimination. “It’s easier to fight ethnic discrimination when it’s directed against older people rather than young people because there is a more spontaneous empathy which one can make into a positive thing to bring down the barriers of racism,” she says. And there is, she asserts, “almost complete consensus” on the reforms she is helping to steer through to prepare society for an ageing population. “It is ambitious,” she says. “It’s both about bringing in new rights and about changing perceptions, changing the paradigm. I am very optimistic about what we will achieve.” Curriculum vitae Age 57. Lives Paris. Education DEA [postgraduate pre-PhD diploma] in law, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris. Career April 2014-present: minister of state for the family, elderly people and adult care; 2011: elected senator for Oise; 2008-2014: national secretary for the environment, Socialist party; 1998-present: Socialist party member, Picardie regional council; 1993-1998: member, National Council of the Socialist party; 1993-96: national secretary for urban affairs, Socialist party; 1991-93: adviser on children’s affairs and relations with parliament, minister of youth and sport’s private office; 1989-91: adviser in the private office of the President of the National Assembly. Interests Downton Abbey, reading novels, listening to music. |