A “single-parent family”
card
opening up to advantages or even preferential rates: the Senate women’s rights delegation proposed Thursday that this system be tested, in a report exploring several avenues to better support and accompany “solo” parents. After having interviewed institutions, associations and concerned parents for three months to identify the difficulties encountered by single-parent families, senators Colombe Brossel (socialist, environmentalist and republican group) and Béatrice Gosselin (related to Les Républicains) led the drafting of this report. listing ten recommendations.
One in four families in France is single-parent, with a woman at the head in 82% of cases, recalls the document. According to INSEE, poverty affects 45% of children who live alone with their mother.
Economic fragility of these families
Among its recommendations, the delegation for women's rights proposes
“the creation, on an experimental basis, of a “single-parent family” card, giving entitlement to advantages and preferential rates”
for certain services and benefits (school canteen, public and collective transport, leisure activities, summer camps, after-school activities, sporting and cultural activities, mutual insurance).
Unlike the “large families” version, such a card would also be
“a means for single parents to report themselves as such”
to the administrations or their employer. During the hearings, some employers indicated that they wanted to offer more flexible arrangements to their single parent employees (more flexible hours, teleworking, etc.) but did not know precisely how to identify them. The Minister responsible for Equality between Women and Men, Aurore Bergé, recently supported the idea of such a
“card”
to improve the
“more specific recognition that we owe to single-parent families”
.
The senators also emphasize the economic fragility of these families:
“Fifteen percent of single-parent families who would be eligible benefit neither from the
RSA
nor from the family support allowance (187.24 euros per month per child, paid in case of failure of the other parent"
), points out the report, which recommends communication campaigns on access to rights. The mission also tackles the issue of alimony
“which is not paid in almost a third of cases”
. It recommends
“more ambitious objectives for reducing non-payment rates”
and considers the option of
“withholding tax if these objectives are not achieved”
.
Since the beginning of March, two parliamentarians have also been working on the issue of single-parent families, mandated by Matignon. On the same subject, the socialist deputy Philippe Brun launched a transpartisan group in the National Assembly in October in order to arrive at a bill in the first half of the year.