The President of the Federation of Solidarity Actors denounces the government’s “unkept promise”

“We need emergency measures, for these children to be taken care of and for us to tackle what is causing lasting poverty in this country,” Pascal Brice demanded on France Inter.

It’s a “broken promise” on behalf of the government, deplores Pascal Brice, president of the Federation of Solidarity Actors, on France Inter on Thursday, August 29, while the number of homeless children is increasing in France. According to the sixth barometer of Unicef ​​France and the FAS, 2,043 children are forced to sleep on the streets. Pascal Brice assures that we must add to this figure the “children who are in makeshift hotels”He believes that we are therefore far from the objective. “zero children on the streets” that the government had set for itself. He also accuses governments “to have made the choice” since the end of the health crisis “to withdraw, to reduce the effort made and to stigmatize”.

Pascal Brice assures that “the quarter” of these children without accommodation solutions “are less than three years old” and are also “most often enrolled in school”. The FAS president describes children, including “the life [est] particularly bumpy and difficult”alive “most often in camps, sometimes with single mothers”. “There is something extraordinarily violent there”he denounces, judging “street violence is particularly unbearable for children”.

The FAS president recalls that France currently has “14% poor” and he estimates that this percentage would rise to “22% if it weren’t for all the aid and redistribution”. For Pascal Brice, most of the people who are in the streets are “working poor, women victims of violence, young people from child welfare, men and women with mental health problems” as well as migrants. The increase in the number of children on the streets reveals, according to him, “increasingly significant flaws”in particular “our migration policy”.

He points his finger “a kind of general hypocrisy”with “increasingly stigmatizing speeches and the immigration law which prevents companies from hiring parents and people who end up on the street to the detriment of their dignity and public order.” Pascal Brice considers that we “has not been able to collectively learn the right lessons since the end of Covid-19”. “At the end of 2020, families were being cared for in emergency accommodation, and now there is a decline, a drop in the number of places”he explains. He sees “a refusal to give ourselves the means to act urgently and sustainably”.

“We need urgent measures, for these children to be taken care of and for us to tackle what is causing poverty in this country.”says the president of the Federation of Solidarity Actors. He regrets that people “increasingly numerous in the streets [soient] taken care of as best they can by local authorities, whose job it is not and who have fewer resources to do so, and by our associations which are in great difficulty”.