The Minister responsible for SMEs Olivia Grégoire wants businesses to be accessible for the 2024 Olympics to make life easier for many French people who live with a disability.
560,000 fifth category shops, restaurants, medical offices and other establishments open to the public are still not accessible to people living with a disability. Less than a year before the Paris Olympic Games, the government wants to work harder.
From Thursday, November 2, all these establishments can register on the Services and Payment Agency website to request financial assistance from the State. It will cover 50% of the price of the accessibility work, up to a ceiling of 20,000 euros. The Minister in charge of Small and Medium Enterprises Olivia Grégoire wants to catch up with France in this area because it will make life easier for many people. But how much? Olivia Grégoire said Tuesday October 31 on RMC: “Approximately one in six French people have a disability, visible or invisible.” Really ?
Up to one in seven French people aged 15 and over in 2021
This figure is not entirely true, but above all it should be put into perspective. It can be found in several official government documents, such as in this report from the Ministry of the Economy on bringing establishments open to the public up to accessibility standards dating from 2019, but also on the Public Life website of the Directorate of legal and administrative information, or on the website of the APF France-Handicap association. On the latter, we read that 12 million French people have a disability, or one in six French people.
If we trace it back, we can find these figures around fifteen years ago. They were published by the Directorate of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (Drees), the statistics service of the Ministry of Health, in a report in 2019, but they actually date from the year 2008 and, above all, that they do not take into account all French people but only people aged 16 and over living in ordinary housing. So neither children nor people housed in specialized establishments. “In 2008, 12.5 million people aged at least 16 living at home in France were affected”, states the report. Count taken from the INSEE Handicap-Santé survey of that year.
We cannot therefore draw conclusions on the proportion of people living with a disability in relation to the national population. It is only possible to talk about this proportion in relation to the number of people aged 16 and over. The report estimates that this represents “25% of the population in this age group”. In other words, one in four French people.
Drees published more recent figures in April 2023 and they are lower. In an overview entitled “Disability in figures”, taken from the INSEE daily life and health survey, management estimates that in 2021 there were up to “7.6 million disabled or dependent people aged 15 or over living in ordinary housing”either “14%” of this age group, or one in seven people aged 15 or over.
Several definitions of disability and several ways of counting
However, these figures must be put into perspective because there is no official count that would perfectly encompass the subject. “There is no single answer to this question, because there is no single definition of what disability is. There are a plurality of ways of understanding this notion, each of which has its own relevance and deserve to be cross-referenced in order to shed light on its different facets”writes Drees in its 2023 report.
It is possible to only look at the number of people who are administratively recognized as disabled, who have a card, specific support at school or work, accommodations, or who receive an allowance. But this definition is very restrictive since many people are not recognized as disabled or do not meet the administration’s criteria.
The 2008 figures mentioned above take into account these administrative data, but are mainly based on declarations, like the figures for the 2023 panorama. Concretely, these figures are taken from the declarations of the French during INSEE surveys. Some report feeling a “severe limitation in a physical, sensory or cognitive function” and others “a strong restriction for more than six months for health reasons in the activities that people usually do”.
When we wrote above that 7.6 million French people aged 15 and over, or one in seven people, live with a disability, this was in truth the highest estimate which includes people who meet at least one of the two criteria mentioned and who therefore live either with a “severe limitation”or with a “strong restriction”. But according to the lowest estimate, which only takes into account people who meet these two criteria at the same time, then there are only 2.6 million people with disabilities, or one in 20 French people. Much less than the figure mentioned by Minister Olivia Grégoire.