Families with children have always been the ones who suffer the most and pay for crises of any kind.
Within the European Commission’s “Annual Strategy for Sustainable Growth”, there is a practical guide to what Europe expects to find in the “Recovery and Resilience” plans of individual states.
The Presidents respectively of the Italian Association of Large Families (ANFN) and of ELFAC, Mario Sberna and Regina Maroncelli, have studied the plan from the large families point of view, which specifically in Italy contain 1/3 of Italian children (despite representing 8% of the population) and they decided to send a letter to the new Italian prime minister Mario Draghi with some requests to be taken into consideration for the preparation of the Recovery Plan.
To formulate these requests, they started from the text of the Italian constitution, which in the art. n. 31 set a “special consideration for large families” intended to
- Compensate for the loss of income that the birth and growth of a child entails.
- Prevent the child from constituting – as is currently the case – a poverty risk factor.
- Prevent poverty and social exclusion.
- Invest in those families that have chosen to invest in the country’s future.
- Invest in structural, stable, reliable and predictable reforms that can give young people the possibility of planning and having the desired number of children.
Implementing the measures proposed by the Commission, the proposal is to recognize:
- The principle of taking into account the number of dependent children and the degree of dependency of children.
- The principle of compensation for income spent on raising the child as “common good”.
- The principle of equity, to remove the causes that penalize families with more children (According to the European Pillars of Social Rights, for social inclusion and to “leave no one behind”).
To achieve these goals, the requests are multiple and related to different areas:
SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY
Support for green mobility: bonus to purchase 7+ seats hybrid cars, bicycles and electric vehicles.
RENOVATION WAVE INITIATIVE
Support for renovation works, energy efficiency and renewable energy expenses, water recycling and greening.
EQUITY
Guarantee equal opportunities for all: quality education, fair working conditions and adequate social protection with particular attention to young people, women, people with disabilities, people with low skills and ethnic minorities.
For this reason, the measures that should be introduced are:
- Policies that allow access to the labor market for young people, such as summer jobs and facilitating the return of working mothers, with incentives to companies
- Improve family/work balance, also by means of incentives for companies to obtain the Family Audit.
- Quality education for the children of large families, with scholarships for access also to private schools, free school books and allowances to access to university and college studies, particularly those more necessary (medicine, computer science …), State-guaranteed forms of student loans. Non-refundable loans for students who commit to staying in the country for at least 5 years after graduation, and loans to purchase a first home for couples who intend to enter into a marriage.
- Establish a network of local health services with the establishment of the figure of the district nurse and counseling, psychological and family support programs.
FISCAL SYSTEM
The tax reform advocated by the Commission could provide for the establishment of family income tax that takes into consideration the number of members of the household. This reform (family quotient/family factor), could give a boost to consumption and allow families to plan their family structure and lead to an improvement in the birth rate.
INFRASTRUCTURE
At no cost, but of great impact on consumption and quality of life: Full implementation of the national Family Card, still stuck and support for the European Network Family friendly Municipalities” project, in order to tackle depopulation while investing in wellbeing and life quality, local human and social development.
