State fails growing ranks of poor

Three years into the crisis, growing numbers of Spaniards are facing destitution, with official figures showing that almost 10 million people (20.8 percent of the population) now live below the poverty line, while other surveys show there is a strong belief among those in work that their standard of living has fallen.

Catholic Church-run international charity Cáritas' latest report, published last week, is based on surveys carried out by its research foundation FOESSA, as well as data from the INE National Statistics Institute. It shows that between 2007 and 2010, 800,000 people fell into poverty, with 1.4 million households trying to cope without a breadwinner, and a further half million with no income whatsoever.

"The crisis has made things worse, but there is a problem of structural weakness"

It takes 65 days for state services to respond to people in severe need

But while the crisis has sent joblessness soaring to more than 20 percent of the workforce, Cáritas points out in its report: "Even people in work say that they feel their standard of living has fallen due to a sense that they could lose their job at any moment."

Cáritas' report shows that poverty will continue to grow in Spain due to "insufficient or soon-to-run-out unemployment payments." Previous reports by the NGO show that even during the boom years, many Spaniards felt that their standard of living was falling. A 2008 survey assessing people's perception of their living standards during the decade up to that year showed that 30 percent of people said that they had felt more prosperous 10 years earlier.

"These people are what we call the boom-time losers," says Sebastián Sarasa Urdiola, who teaches in the political science department of Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, adding: "and little remains now of the boom years."

Sarasa Urdiola's work is included in FOESSA's report, titled The first impact of the crisis on Spain's social fabric , which was presented last week by Cáritas secretary general Sebastián Mora and research coordinator Francisco Lorenzo. Sarasola's finding's show that over the last three years there has been a turnaround in the numbers of people who say that their quality of life has deteriorated. In 2007, one in four Spaniards said that their living standards had risen; by 2010, that figure had fallen to just one in 10. Similarly, half of Spaniards surveyed over the last year said that they were worse off than 10 years ago, compared to 27 percent who felt this way in 2007.

At the EU level, Spaniards are particularly pessimistic: some 85 percent believe that poverty has increased, with 60 percent qualifying the increase as "intense," compared to the EU average of 38 percent.

The proportion of Spaniards living below the poverty line - defined as making do on less than 60 percent of average income - grew to 20.8 percent in 2010 from 19.5 percent in 2009, according to the INE. The average household income in Spain in 2009 fell 2.9 percent to 25,732 euros a year, meaning households below the poverty line were bringing in less than 1,287eurosa month.

The INE's figures show that fully 30.4 percent of all households reported having "difficulty" or "great difficulty" paying basic bills, up from 26.2 percent in 2005 when the Spanish economy experienced a property boom. The percentage of people who said that they had been late over the past 12 months with household expenses such as mortgage payments or electricity bills rose to 7.7 percent this year from 4.7 percent in 2005.

The Cáritas report highlights the failure of the Spanish state to address the problem of growing poverty, either at the national, regional, or local level. In short, the country's social services are not up to the task in hand. Cáritas says that the unemployed and homeless face long delays and red tape.

The report says that it can take up to a month before state social services are able to arrange an interview. Cáritas says that the average wait for somebody asking it for help is four days, although severe cases are often dealt within 24 hours.

Sebastián Mora says that successive Spanish governments over the past three decades - the majority of them headed by the Socialist Party - have failed to develop a viable welfare state, and that social services are now ill-equipped to deal with a fast-growing human crisis.

"The situation has been made worse by high demand, but is also due to structural weaknesses, such as lack of human and material resources," he says.

The result is that it takes an average of 65 days for the state's social services to respond to people in severe need.

During which time, says Cáritas, people facing hardship fall deeper into poverty. The organization says that as the crisis deepens, the inability of the state to meet the needs of the homeless and unemployed is being increasingly exposed. As a result, the burden of taking care of those hardest hit by the economic crisis is largely being shouldered by religious charities such as Cáritas. Mora says that the organization often has to pay out money to tide people over until they receive any payment from the state.

To illustrate the scale of the problem, Cáritas says that requests for the government's minimum income payment for households with no income, which is managed by regional governments, take an average of 132 days before any payment is made.

According to the Cáritas survey, those asking for more help are single mothers, the unemployed aged over 40 with few qualifications, young families with small children, and migrant women looking for their first job when their husbands are out of work.

The picture painted by Cáritas is one of a state ill-prepared to deal with the human impact of the current crisis, and that were it not for such charities, hundreds of thousands of people would already be homeless. "We are bridging a growing poverty gap, but Cáritas is meant to be an adjunct to state-run social services, not a substitute," says Mora.