Communities will have the "means" to increase civil servants, assures Guerini

Europe 1 with AFP 12:43 p.m., June 29, 2022

The day after the announcement of a general increase of 3.5% for civil servants from July 1, the Minister of Public Service Stanislas Guerini assured Wednesday that communities would have "the means" budgetary to "cope" with this wage increase.

"With my colleague Christophe Béchu, Minister Delegate for Local Authorities, we brought together local employers last week to address these issues," said the government member on LCI.

Empower communities

"We will be there to give local authorities the means to cope", guaranteed Stanislas Guerini.

According to him, the mayors and other presidents of departments "are asking for visibility on state grants", in a context where the salary increases of some two million territorial public officials should cost their employers nearly 2.3 billion euros over a full year. 

"The commitment we are making is to give them this visibility in the budget discussions that we will have in the fall, and I believe multi-year visibility, an ability to project ourselves into the five-year term", argued the Minister of Public Service.

Stanislas Guerini ensures that he has not reduced the budget allocated by the State to communities (the DGFs) during the previous five-year period.

"It is exactly the same logic that must prevail in this five-year term," he concluded.

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 Rise in the index point of civil servants: real real boost?

An increase of 115 million euros in 2022

Since the announcement in March of the thaw of the index point, the common remuneration base for 5.7 million public officials, communities have regularly worried about their ability to finance it.

Tuesday, June 28, the Association of the departments of France (ADF) had thus regretted in a press release the “strong implications” of the general increases on the budget of the local authorities. 

The thaw of the index point "will represent an increase of nearly 115 million euros in 2022 and 230 million in a full year for the Departments", had quantified the ADF.

The spokesperson for the Coordination of Territorial Employers, Philippe Laurent, for his part stressed that the communities were not "sitting on a pile of gold".

Tense during Emmanuel Macron's first five-year term, relations between the State and local authorities became even more tense when the presidential camp announced its intention, during the last campaign, to ask for 10 billion euros in savings from local authorities in over the next five years.