SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, June 18 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The CC candidate for the Congress of Deputies for Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cristina Valido, has lamented the “fiasco” of the Minimum Vital Income in Spain, “and very especially, unfortunately, in the Canary Islands”, due to “mismanagement” of the government.
In a statement, the nationalist recalled that the islands have the highest poverty rates and that sufficient coverage has not been achieved “not even remotely”.
“To further aggravate the situation, these days we have learned about the report of the Independent Association of Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) that quantifies that 284,00 households benefit from the income, only 35% of the 800,000 that could receive it and that subsequent reviews are forcing the beneficiaries to return amounts of up to 2,500 euros, people who, let’s remember, live in a situation of extreme need,” he said.
For Valido, the “disastrous” management of the Government of Spain has not been able to deal with the problems that have arisen since its creation, in 2020, “as we have warned on numerous occasions from CC both in the Parliament of the Canary Islands and in the Congress of Deputies and the Senate”.
“But even so,” he continued, “Minister Escrivá guaranteed our deputy Ana Oramas that the Ministry’s performance had been a success and that it was not necessary to take any measure, “but she already reminded him that you cannot cheat at solitary, and play with the numbers sometimes of households and other times of people, to try to give a good headline”.
He added here that the situation derives from the haste in the elaboration of the legal norm and the establishment of requirements that supposed the exclusion of a significant percentage of people.
Subsequent corrections came to further complicate this nonsense, giving the case of people who have submitted up to 12 applications.
In this sense, and as Valido points out, “those who are trying to help are not people with access to legal resources or technological knowledge to persevere in the defense of their rights.”
“Today we find ourselves with the sad reality that many people who are entitled to help do not request it, the Administration has difficulties detecting who really needs it because it does not have a system adjusted to reality that is trying to improve, there is a overlap with other aid from the Autonomous Communities, and, to all this, is added the chaos that has characterized the operation of Social Security since the start of the pandemic, with closed offices and few staff, who were never recognized by their management despite of taking more than 120 days to resolve a file,” he added.
In the Canary Islands, as in other territories, “face-to-face care is essential to guarantee service and advice.” “You cannot trust the application procedure to digital skills, when precisely these people, due to their conditions, lack them, creating a digital divide that is insurmountable for many,” he denounced.
