In Spain, according to the latest available data, as of 2024, 29.2% of families with children live below the poverty line. Year after year, it is among the European Union countries with the worst data. A structural problem and an anomaly for the community club’s fourth economy. Faced with this situation, the government is committed to taking steps towards a universal subsidy for children’s education, a type of aid available to most EU countries and which academia and children’s organizations are calling for to alleviate these figures. Sumar, in fact, proposes that all families receive 200 euros per month for each child, until they turn 18, regardless of income.
The Council of Ministers approves this Tuesday an institutional declaration, on the occasion of the International Day of the Rights of the Child which is celebrated this Thursday, which does not go as far as the minority partner of the government would like, but it goes in this direction.
“Economic inequality also affects entire lives from childhood,” the document reads. “For this reason, the Ministry of Youth and Children continues to promote policies to combat child poverty,” we read in the text. Such as compliance with the action plan for the implementation of the European Child Guarantee – a program to combat the social exclusion of minors – and the extension of the integration of child support to the minimum living income (IMV) – assistance which is actually received by those who have children and are beneficiaries of the IMV, but which can also be requested by families who do not receive this aid, but who do not exceed certain incomes. All this, we read in the declaration, “while moving towards a benefit for children’s education based on parameters of universality and fiscal equity”.
Already in the last legislature, Ione Belarra (Podemos) had proposed for the first time a universal subsidy for the education of children, which he wanted to include in family law, without success due to the reluctance of the socialist wing of the Executive. This government, a coalition between PSOE and Sumar, approved last year in the Council of Ministers this law, currently being developed in Congress and blocked for months, which provides for a family income of 100 euros per month for families with children up to three years old, although not universally.
Currently, most of these families already receive this help, through a refundable tax deduction for working mothers, because it was expanded in 2023 to also include cases not previously covered, such as women collecting unemployment benefits. But it still doesn’t reach all homes.
This is precisely the problem: not all families submit tax returns. Precisely the most vulnerable are excluded. The minimum living income is designed for them and also child support, a supplement to the minimum living income (which amounts to 115 euros for children up to three years old). But many of those who could benefit from these benefits, not free from bureaucracy, do not even apply for them.
To avoid this exclusion, as well as the stigmatization of those who have to ask for help for people in vulnerable situations, children’s organizations and experts defend the existence of a universal subsidy for children’s education. According to sources from the Ministry of Youth and Children, this formula would allow the current assistance model to be set aside and would halve the rate of child poverty.
The Sumar movement, led by Yolanda Díaz, has proposed this measure several times as one of its priorities in the General State Budget. Some bills that the Executive intends to present by 2026, despite Junts having announced that he will not support them, which complicates their approval.
In the EU, 17 of the 27 members benefit from a universal income for education, as claimed several times by the Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy, who defends that the measure is accompanied by a tax reform. Spain is the member state that has the least capacity to reduce child poverty through aid, as highlighted by Unicef last year, when the organization also highlighted that the country invests only 1.5% of GDP in the social protection of children and families, compared to the European average of 2.4%.
The OECD has called on Spain to explore the path of universal benefits for children’s education. As highlighted in a campaign a couple of years ago by the Children’s Platform, which brings together the main organizations that defend children’s rights in Spain, in countries such as Germany they receive 219 euros per month for each child and in Ireland 140, up to the age of 18.
In 2024, Save the Children, Unicef and the Children’s Platform carried out a simulation of how much it would cost Spain to propose universal child support, through a refundable tax deduction, and proposed four scenarios with different amounts, with net costs ranging from 3,180 million euros per year to 8,668 million.
The institutional declaration approved by the Council of Ministers states that “no child or adolescent should have their future limited by their economic or housing situation”. For all these reasons, the Ministry of Youth and Children is promoting a state pact for the elimination of child poverty.
