A woman, during a visit to the Caritas Food Bank in Murcia. /
The Region has 309,771 inhabitants at risk of poverty and 19,783 recipients of minimum income
6.39% of people on the poverty line in the Region of Murcia receive the minimum insertion income (RMI) offered by the Autonomous Community, according to the Association of Directors and Managers of Social Services (Adygss), which has published its Minimum Insertion Income Report for the year 2020, which has been made public by the Ministry of Social Rights.
According to the study, the Region has 309,771 inhabitants at risk of poverty and 19,783 recipients of minimum income.
At the national level, only 9% of people on the poverty line receive the minimum insertion income (RMI) offered by the autonomous communities.
This percentage conceals, according to the association, “extreme differences”. Thus, two communities stand out, such as the Basque Country and Navarra, with percentages that account for 61.7% and 59.6%, respectively, of their population below the poverty line; followed by Asturias and Cantabria, where almost one in 6 people below the poverty line receive these incomes.
Of the rest, only three communities guarantee percentages greater than 10%: these are Catalonia, Aragon and the Balearic Islands. The RMI of the remaining 10 communities “do not even reach this coverage, and in the case of Castilla-La Mancha and the Canary Islands, their percentages only reach or are below 2%”, denounces the ADYGSS.
Given these data, the association has asked the Ministry to simplify the procedures of the Minimum Vital Income (IMV) and “fulfill the promise of guaranteeing the benefit to 800,000 families as it had promised, and recover the 1,000 million that it has not managed in the year of the greatest social crisis in the recent history of our country».
Likewise, they demand from the autonomous communities that the 1,686 million euros that they invested in minimum income “be oriented towards guaranteeing the right to social insertion, reinforcing social services, for the fight against social exclusion that produces continued poverty, transmitted generationally and with no possible way out in a context of scarcity and precariousness of opportunities in the labor market».
The average amount per recipient of the RMI in Spain as a whole represents 15.3% of the average income per household in Spain, in his opinion, an extremely low amount and which has dropped 2 points since 2019, from 17.1 % to 15%, probably conditioned by the appearance of the Minimum Vital Income.
Minimum percentage in the Region
The Valencian Community, with 23.4%, is the autonomous community whose RMI recipients receive a higher amount in relation to the income of their community. It is followed by Extremadura with amounts higher than 20% of the average income of its territory, while in the case of Cantabria it stands at 13%. On the contrary, two communities have a minimum percentage, below 10%: Murcia (9.3%) and the Balearic Islands (6.8%). Tiny amounts that, in no way, allow the recipients to guarantee their survival, warns the ADYGSS.
According to the latest data, 799,203 people are beneficiaries of the Minimum Vital Income, while at the end of 2020 795,861 people received the minimum income of the autonomous communities. “Only 0.04% is what the minimum vital income would have improved the coverage of the minimum income of the autonomous communities”, lament the Directors and Managers of Social Services.
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