Proposition 53K1783

Projet de loi contenant le premier ajustement du Budget général des dépenses pour l'année budgétaire 2011.

General information ¶

Submitted by

CD&V Leterme Ⅱ

Submission date

Oct. 6, 2011

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

budget national budget

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

CD&V Vooruit LE PS | SP Open Vld MR

Voted to reject

Groen Ecolo VB

Abstained from voting

∉ N-VA LDD

Party dissidents ¶

• Peter Luykx (CD&V) abstained from voting.

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Discussion ¶

Oct. 27, 2011 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

by Mr. Goffin, the rapporteur, refers to this in his written report.

Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, Mr. Minister, Mr. Secretary of State, apparently there is no reception crisis. The federal government takes €2.7 million from your budget, Mr. Courard. It removes EUR 2.7 million from Fedasil and redistributes that to other migration items within the budget.

Apparently there is no problem for the government, as your budget is reduced by €2.7 million, while there is a giant crisis on the field. This is the budget for the local reception initiatives, the LOIs, which are said to have not been filled. You have said that you are aspiring to create two thousand additional places in those LOIs, but you are not reaching your goal at all. Many OCMWs are not so enthusiastic about accepting asylum seekers. The federal government thus takes away €2.7 million from Fedasil. Apparently there is no problem, because this is not internally redistributed. It is not distributed to other posts within Asylum to address the reception crisis, but it is redistributed over other matters.

In this bill there are a number of good things, a number of bad things and a number of nonsense.

A good thing is the fact that additional money is being allocated to staff to do more bot scans for minor foreigners. Many minors lie about their age. I think this is 70%. Ms. Smeyers asked for the figures. A bot scan is carried out by the Service of Justice of the FOD Justice and it shows that there is a margin of error up to twenty-one years. If a person is over twenty-one years old, he is only truly major and no longer entitled to subsidiary protection under the relevant legislation.

On its own, it is a good thing to recruit additional staff, as there is a very large waiting list for the bot scans as a check on the age of the minor foreigners. N-VA supports this and we – Mrs. Dumery, Mrs. Smeyers and other colleagues – intervene about this weekly.

Mr. Minister of Budget, we are less enthusiastic about closed centers. You argue that we need additional money for the closed centers, such as asylum center 127bis. No Border Network and the extreme left are very active in this world and especially in Belgium and have the pleasure of debating in the closed centers, jolting the people so that there are fires and escape attempts and so on. They held very hard in those closed centers in March, namely in the asylum center 127bis in Steenokkerzeel. Two wings were completely burned. You say you need extra money to renovate those wings and to hire staff there.

Mr. Secretary of State, three weeks ago I asked you whether the center of Steenokkerzeel was open again. You answered negatively. There is some delay. The management of the buildings does not want to cooperate. It will be reopened at the earliest in March 2012.

In your budget adjustment, you propose to provide additional budgets for a center that you already know will not be finished before March 2012. Thus, they are completely useless. This legislative change makes no sense at all. Of course, we oppose this. We are in favor of expanding the closed centers, doing the renovation as soon as possible and recruiting additional personnel if necessary, but it must make sense.

You also say you need extra money for the Caricole, a new center that comes in Steenokkerzeel. You promised last year that the Caricole would open on 1 February 2011. We could be calm, that was okay. It is now eight months later and the opening is absolutely not in the prospect. In the committee you said that the center would open on 1 December 2011. You are asking for 509 000 euros in additional resources to open the Caricole.

Mr. Secretary of State and Mr. Minister of Budget, I am here not so long, and I do not need to teach you lessons. You will know that the salary of a staff member recruited after 1 December will be counted in the following year.

Mr. Francken, you say the same as in the committee. You can read the report of the committee.

You are not listening.

I listen, but I already know.

We should only listen, not respond.

I now talk about the Open Return Center. The idea to open an open return center as soon as possible comes from N-VA. Of course we support it.

Again, you do not meet the deadline. You will never get them, Mr. Wathelet. You promise a lot, but in practice, almost nothing changes.

On Tuesday, November 1, the open return center would open. I am convinced that it will not open on Tuesday. Everyone knows that. You are in the middle of a great discussion with Prime Minister Leterme about the location. You want to have the centre in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw. Unfortunately, they have a marked CD&V mayor who resists with hand and tooth. We absolutely support Ms. Vanlinthout. Flemish-Brabant is already doing its part. Don’t make me suffer from the NIMBY syndrome. It is indeed my electoral circle, but Flemish-Brabant already has 4 closed centers.

Mr. Wathelet, I suggest that you may once open a closed center in Waals-Brabant or elsewhere in Wallonia, so in your democracy.

This million euros will receive our support. We are convinced that the open return centre in question can effectively benefit the return policy. We are in principle in favour of this point. However, the centre must not be in Flemish-Brabant. Just find a location in La Hulpe or, for example, in Lasne, the municipality of Mrs. Onkelinx and Mr. Uyttendaele. To open a centre a year before the municipal elections does not seem to be a bad idea.

Fifth, I am now addressing the liberal members in the chamber. My fifth point concerns family reunification. In this case, there is real stupidity.

Mr. Vanhengel, apparently you do not have enough cabinet staff anymore. The ICOs are no longer followed. You have completely put yourself in your pocket.

You are asking for an additional EUR 450 000 for eight full-time, immediately statutory officials – thus not contractual but statutory officials – on the grounds that there is a new law on family reunification, which brings an additional job burden. Because there is an income requirement, there is more workload per file.

This reasoning in itself, I follow. She is also right. Should additional officials be recruited? This is absolutely not the case. I will give you three good reasons that demonstrate that the liberals have completely put themselves in the pocket on this subject.

Less and no more officials are needed. You are looking for eight to ten billion euros. However, you are throwing 450 000 euros here. You have not thought about it. I am also curious what Minister Q or Minister Kafka would think of the above. It is for less, rather than for more employees.

First, by the judgment-Zambrano, the new law on family reunification stipulates that illegal persons who are parents of a Belgian child no longer have to pass through a regularization procedure or through the service Regularisations. They must immediately pass through family reunification and thus through the Family reunification service. Therefore, you have too many regulatory officials in the service.

Mr. Secretary of State, I have asked you a written question about the number of staff members at the Foreign Affairs Service per service.

Mr. Secretary of State, under your administration, the number of officials in the Regularization Service has tripled, namely, from 50 officials to 150 full-time equivalents. It is about your own figures. There are 50 officials in the Family Reunification Service. The Family Reunification service is the largest migration gateway, but it has 50 officials. The Regularization service is not a major migration gateway at all, but it counts 150 full-time equivalents. They came under your policy.

My position is that you can perfectly shift a number of officials instead of hiring another eight new, immediately statutory officials. You can transfer them internally to another service. Take eight officials away from the Regularization service – 150 officials on the aforementioned service are far too many – and put them under the Family Reunification service.

Mr. Wathelet, you declare today in Le Vif/L’Express that you have 55% fewer regularisation requests for 2011. I say chapeau.

I want to say something about it, because I think you are making a reasoning mistake.

You say, as many as a thousand regularization files less, so many officials is less. Of course, this is not how it works. The Service Regularisations still has a lot of lagging in files to work away. If you want that backwardness to be picked up and people are removed, then the backwardness will rise again. So simple is that.

This is a reasoning that does not come up. One can only shift staff if the backward has been picked up, and so far this is not the case. I suspect you want us to shift officials, to say that there will be backwardness.

I also want to respect my commitment to the government. With this regularization, we aimed to remove the backwardness. I want to let the people who are now working to remove the lag in the regularization files work.

We need to shorten the regularization process to ensure that there will never be a new regularization campaign and we need to be able to handle the regularization in the shortest possible time. That is my goal. I will not take away from it.

Mr. Minister, Mr. Secretary of State, the liberals have been allowed to do in this case. Probably no one in your cabinet has even noticed that.

Why do you immediately hire eight staff members for family reunification and no contracts? Why Immediately Statute? There is no explanation. That is not necessary. In the Netherlands, the stricter law on family reunification has resulted in up to 37% fewer applications over a five-year period.

I understand your reasoning that there is more work per file, but there will be fewer files. So you can perfectly get around with the number of staff members you currently have.

If you are still going to hire additional staff, you should sign contracts for two, three, four or a maximum of five years, but still not statutory members. You increase your official apparatus by eight statutory officers. That is stupid. That is unwise. You have not thought about it enough.

Mr. Francken, you have to stay a bit correct. You know the numbers, too. You can follow them on data.be. If there’s something you won’t be able to blame this federal government for is that the number of officials has not decreased.

If the other entities followed the example of the federal government, the total number of civil servants in Belgium would have been much lower.

I do not know which officials you mean. At the Flemish level, there are also fewer civil servants. There are fewer people working in the cabinets and there are fewer officials, secure and fixed. I do not know what you are insinuating.

My position is the following. You do not need additional staff on family reunification for 450 000 euros. You can perfectly rearrange internally. In fact, the duty tax within the service Regularisations is reduced, because the illegals who are parents of a Belgian child now all fall under the service Family Reunification. They go to the service Family Reunification and no longer to the service Regularisations, by the judgment-Zambrano. You know there will be fewer requests, fewer files. In the long run, there should be fewer people. Therefore, you have no reason to appoint those additional staff members immediately. Then hire contractual staff, but not immediately statutory. That proposal is absolutely unreasonable, not thought out. You get out of the curve.

We submitted amendments. I can only hope that there will be support for this, especially from the liberal colleagues.

Short and short. It is about 4 billion.

I partially agree with Mr. President’s position. by Francken. When I read the minutes of the meeting, I find that Mr. Francken believes that the government does not perceive the seriousness of the reception crisis.

In September last year, additional crisis measures were announced to accommodate asylum seekers during the winter months. At that time, 2,500 additional seats were planned in the barracks and 2,000 in the ILAs.

Why is it that this year the government does nothing and that, doing so, people will again find themselves in a critical humanitarian situation?

It is incomprehensible to see the government transferring funds from Fedasil to other asylum agencies, precisely at the time when this agency will have to provide additional accommodation places.

For one time, I totally agree with mr. by Francken.

Withdrawal of 2.7 million euros to Mr. Courard at the moment when ten thousand people did not see themselves designated a place of reception is totally incomprehensible.

Like the mr. Today, 47 people who, just arriving in Belgium, were applying for asylum for the first time have been sent back on the streets.

The European Court of Human Rights has taken the ears of Mr. An Afghan teacher, alone with her three children, found herself on the street despite a conviction from the labour court.

Given the situation, I am unable to understand the decision that is to withdraw 2.7 million from Mr. Budget. Courard, especially since a significant part of this amount – 1.3 million – will be paid to the budget of the closed centers only for the month of December. I think these are structures that are very expensive!

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to say to Mrs. Genot that it is useless, in the context of a budget discussion, to give a caricatural vision.

Mrs. Genot, can you quote me the case of a person who would not have benefited from a place of reception for budgetary reasons?

Do you know why these people are out?

We know it. The problem is the creation of places. This has never been for budget issues.

You know, like me, the difficulty associated with local host initiatives (ILA) as such. It is that we have offered the possibility of having a voluntary framework for municipalities to return to the ILA. Unfortunately, as many municipalities as planned did not assume their burden of solidarity in the framework of the creation of ILA places. These ILA basic allocation amounts could not be used for other purposes than the creation of ILA seats. Madame Genot, we also cannot use the money that was planned for Fedasil to create spaces.

What are we doing here? The problem is taken at the base, that is, as part of asylum procedures as such. In this context, the faster decisions on asylum procedures are made, the faster the discharge of host institutions and the creation of places for people.

The fact of using money to go faster in the procedures allows to release reception places faster than if new centers were created, with all the difficulties that this entails. This is not a budget problem that prevents the creation of seats. The faster the procedure will be, the less difficulty we will have with the reception places.

If you want to speed up the asylum procedure, there needs to be more staff at the CGRA. How many additional officials have been allocated to the CGRA in this budget?

and forty six.

This is not enough. There are 10,000 files in delay.

We have never had such a high productivity in the CGRA. There will be 46 more people.

There are 10,000 delayed files in the CGRA, and some date from two or three years. As you can see, with 46, it will not be enough. In this budget correction, there is no one more for the CGRA. Your explanation is not correct.

You say that we cannot use the means of the ILA to accommodate asylum seekers in other types of structures. Indeed is . But this is what a budget adjustment serves: to move budgets from one budget line to another. Here, you refused to invest in reception. This is clearly due to a lack of political will.

We have submitted a bill to compel all municipalities to participate and give seats in the ILA. Political will is absent. This is not due to a lack of money, but rather to a refusal to fund sufficiently this type of project.

Thank you Mrs. I no longer have members in the general discussion.