“These are billions who represent non-recourse, that is to say French people who do not know how to access a certain number of social aids, who sometimes do not know how to access them”assured the President of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand, support of Emmanuel Macron, questioned Monday, April 11, on franceinfo.
There is no overall figure on the non-use of social benefits, but studies confirm that it is indeed a “scale phenomenon”. As a DREES study explains, “the difficulty of quantifying non-take-up lies mainly in access to sufficiently rich data sources representative of the population”. However, estimates show that this would indeed represent several billion euros.
Just for the RSA, the DREEs estimated last February that non-use would represent three billion euros per year because, in concrete terms, each quarter, a third of eligible households do not use this service. Another estimate concerning the CMU, complementary universal health coverage, also shows that more than a third of the people who are entitled to it do not ask for this aid.
Concerning the RSA, the DREES, our that non-recourse appears more important among people in couples, without children, young people and graduates. It is also more common among people who own their homes than among tenants, and more in rural areas and in the Paris area than elsewhere in France. Only 11% of non-users indicate that they are unaware of the existence of this service. On the other hand, among those who know the RSA but have never benefited from it, more than half simply thought they were not entitled to it. For some of these non-requesters, the procedures were considered too complicated. For others, it was more a question of a desire not to depend on social assistance.