The government is making a new effort to try to bring the issuance of passports and identity cards within a reasonable time frame. Friday, January 13, visiting the town hall of Créteil, the Minister Delegate in charge of local authorities, Dominique Faure, defended the determination of the executive to sustainably pass the waiting time to obtain his residence papers. “110, 120 days” – peaking in May 2022 – at 50 days, roughly the average five years ago.
After the 14 million euros released last year, 20 million euros will be devoted in 2023 to this sensitive question of the daily life of the French. Similarly, 500 mobile application collection “desks” will be added to those already in place. By 2022, 620 of these registration machines which allow the procedure to be started, including taking fingerprints, had already been purchased by the government to complete the 4,000 already installed in some 2,500 town halls.
The government knows the tensions that this causes on the ground at a time when, from the spring, the prospect of summer holidays pushes many French people to worry about renewing their passport or their identity card. Head of the service that receives citizens at the town hall of Créteil, Stéphanie Sutera acknowledges that there have been “aggressiveness, especially in the spring of 2022”. But “It calmed down in August”, she continues; people went on vacation…
Removal of counters
While town halls and prefectures had to process 9 million in 2019, 12 million were filed in 2022, and the government expects 13 million to 14 million this year. According to the executive, this is explained by the delay at the time of the health crisis, from 2020. Confinements and restrictive measures have paralyzed this type of administrative procedure, which is all the less useful as people no longer travel. The attraction for the new national identity cards would also have pushed requests up, according to the minister’s entourage.
This is not the opinion of the first public service union. Joint Secretary General of the CGT Federation covering the State civil service, Céline Verzeletti recalls that the transition to the secure identity card, a few years ago, had to “so-called” simplify the daily procedures of citizens. But, assures the union official, this has posed to the municipalities equipped with recording machines “a great difficulty for, on the one hand, to process the requests of their own citizens and, on the other hand, to absorb the influx of requests from people residing in other municipalities” not equipped with these tools. “If we hadn’t abolished the counters in 2017believes M.me Verzeletti, there would not have been these recurring problems of deadlines. »
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