Surprisingly enough, the residence allowance (IR) for civil servants is a device that is very often unknown to the main parties concerned. This, however, is not new. According to the Ministry of Action and Public Accounts, it was created in 1919 “in order to compensate, for public officials, the disparities in the cost of living on the national territory”. Despite some revisions to the device over the years, the system has remained the same for over a century.
The Forgotten Southwest
The principle is simple: each French municipality belongs to one of the three zones determined by the government. In the first, which mainly covers Île-de-France and the Marseille region…
Surprisingly enough, the residence allowance (IR) for civil servants is a device that is very often unknown to the main parties concerned. This, however, is not new. According to the Ministry of Action and Public Accounts, it was created in 1919 “in order to compensate, for public officials, the disparities in the cost of living on the national territory”. Despite some revisions to the device over the years, the system has remained the same for over a century.
The Forgotten Southwest
The principle is simple: each French commune belongs to one of the three zones determined by the government. In the first, which mainly covers Île-de-France and the Marseilles region, the agents of the three public services (State, territorial and hospital) receive each month an IR corresponding to 3% of their gross salary. In the second, where there are cities like Lille, Lyon, Montpellier, Brest, Nancy or Nantes, as well as their suburbs, the IR is set at 1%. In the last category, the most widespread, no IR is paid.
In the seven departments covered by “Sud Ouest”, no jealousy, everyone is housed in the same boat. From the Pyrénées-Atlantiques to the Charente-Maritime via the Gironde, no one benefits from this residence allowance. When he left Paris to settle in Bordeaux, an agent recounts having discovered the existence of this IR when he noticed that a “line” had disappeared from his payslip: “The city is expensive, so people don’t understand that they don’t get this IR here, he squeals. For equal positions, equal pay, agents in Bordeaux have the lowest purchasing power in France. »
A ranking from 2001
In the South-West, this absence of residence allowance calls into question if we focus on the cases of Bordeaux, the Basque Country, La Rochelle or even the Arcachon basin, where real estate prices have exploded . A study carried out by MeilleursAgents concluded that between 2002 and 2022, in Bordeaux, real estate prices increased by 329%, i.e. a quadrupling of prices! In La Rochelle, over the same period, the increase was 225%. If the Basque Country has not been studied, the trend is similar there…
Problem: the list of municipalities benefiting from the residence allowance has not been revised since 2001. “It creates an injustice because the ranking no longer has any relation to the reality of the real estate market”, plague Loïc Prud man, LFI deputy for Gironde. In February 2019, the elected official had raised the problem of Bordeaux in a question to the government. He called for an “updating” of the IR in order to “ensure social and territorial justice”. Two senators made a similar request: the socialist Philippe Madrelle, shortly before his death, and Nathalie Delattre, elected from the Radical Party. Proof, if needed, that the fight goes beyond partisan considerations.
A matter of cost
The response of the Ministry of Action and Public Accounts to these questions, in 2019, was as follows: “Since 2001, the administration no longer has the material possibility of updating the classification” of the municipalities. Reason put forward: Insee no longer proceeds, “since 2004”, to “general population censuses every five years” but to “partial annual censuses which no longer allow the classification to evolve”. “However, a deferred reclassification would be likely to generate litigation for breach of the principle of equal treatment”, concluded the ministry, which did not respond to our interview requests.
“It’s a false argument,” retorts Loïc Prud’homme. “If the government wants to update the IR, if there is political will, they can do it. The excuse of INSEE, it suits them because it allows them to move nothing. So what would be the “real reason” for this lack of updating? “It’s a question of cost, admits Nathalie Delattre. We can clearly see the number of civil servants who can be affected by this allowance, in Gironde and everywhere in France. We must evaluate the cost to know what order of magnitude we are talking about. Hundreds of millions? It’s a decision that, financially, would be a bit heavy. “It would have very quickly colossal budgetary implications”, deciphers a connoisseur of the file.
“Logic of austerity”
For the public service unions, it seems obvious that the State has little desire to put its hand in the wallet: “The public authorities do not want to give themselves the means to take this decision, which would nevertheless be a legal decision , annoys Julien Ruiz, of the departmental direction of the CGT in Gironde. We have been in a logic of austerity vis-à-vis the public service for years. There is an ideological presupposition which consists in saying that we cost too much…”
“We must manage to find a solution, because it is not tenable”, resumes Nathalie Delattre. In 2019, the senator, asked by agents of the Atelier Industriel de l’Aéronautique (AIA) in Bordeaux on this question, sent a letter to the Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly. In its response, the latter recognized the “outdatedness” of a device “which has not been revised for more than twenty years and has thus not taken into account the increase in the cost of living”. She added “having contacted the General Directorate of Administration and the Civil Service so that the amounts of income tax for these civil servants are reconsidered. The request obviously did not bear fruit because since then nothing has changed.
Ten years of freezing of the index point
In the ranks of the CGT, it is readily admitted that the updating of the IR has not been the main battleground in recent years. The major issue concerns the unfreezing of the index point, which serves as the basis for calculating the salaries of civil servants. Apart from two slight increases in 2016 and 2017 (+ 0.6% each year), it has not changed since 2010. A blockage which arouses “a feeling of exacerbated injustice” among agents, believes Julien Ruiz.