It’s an ordinary day at 115 Seine-Saint-Denis. During the day of October 23, 1,072 calls were made to the emergency number to obtain a night in emergency accommodation. 306 were able to be picked up. From these calls, it emerged that 471 people asked to be sheltered.
Only 12 could be. Among the 459 people without a solution: 15 single men, 23 single women, 52 couples without children and 369 people in families. That night, in this department alone, 212 minor children slept outside for lack of solution, including 53 under 3 years old.
As the return of winter temperatures approaches, the observation is terribly banal: despite an unprecedented effort in ten years, which increased the number of emergency accommodation places financed by the State to 203,000, for a budget of almost 3 billion euros, the system is saturated. It’s not new. But what is more so is that it is so much so that, to sort out between those who can hope to have a roof over their heads and the others, the criteria for prioritizing the public are hardening to a staggering degree.
The Federation of Solidarity Actors, which brings together emergency accommodation stakeholders and is used to going to the front, but also the Red Cross, a usually silent operator, wrote a joint letter to the minister on October 17 of housing Valérie Létard to worry about it.
“We would like to alert you to the extremely degraded situation that many Integrated Reception and Orientation Services (SIAO) are experiencing today”the services which manage the 115, write Pascal Brice and Philippe da Costa, the presidents of two associations. In a context of saturation of the accommodation park, “it is increasingly common for restrictive criteria for access to accommodation systems to be imposed on SIAOs, excluding certain audiences”, they write.
“We are seeing increasing pressure from certain prefects”
If single men have not been considered a priority for a long time, women with children are now only considered a priority if they are very young. So much so that, in certain departments, it is said that pregnant women under six months and those with infants over 3 months are no longer among the public with absolute priority.
“We are seeing increasing pressure from certain prefects to impose a hierarchy of vulnerability, specifies Pascal Brice. Most often, these are oral instructions, but sometimes these directives are written and each time we contest them and if necessary we attack them before the administrative courts because they are contrary.to the fundamental principle of the unconditionality of reception enshrined in our law. »
According to the Federation of Solidarity Actors, four disputes are underway in Calvados, Rhône, Bas-Rhin and Morbihan, and other files are under examination. “We sometimes reach paroxysmic situations like in Chartes, in Eure-et-Loir, where a member association refused to apply the instructions of the prefect, who then excluded it from the management of the SIAO”, resumes Pascal Brice.
In this context, write the FAS and the Red Cross to the minister, “while associations have always been there to support the State in recent successive crises, they are now questioning the opportunity and meaning of continuing these missions in such conditions.”
“We must find solutions for vulnerable groups,” we respond, without further details, in those around Valérie Létard or where however mentions “the tripling of credits in ten years, to 2.8 billion euros” and the results of the Housing First policy, which would have enabled 600,000 people to move from the streets to housing since 2018. The associations are above all waiting for the government to prepare, without waiting for the period of extreme cold, the opening of winter places.
