Almost 242,000 people who receive the thermal social bonus have not proven income problems and, therefore, the administration has had no way of knowing if they are vulnerable. They are, in all cases, large families, such as those of the vice president of the Community of Madrid, Enrique Ossorio, or that of the leader of Más Madrid, Mónica García, who requested help to lower their energy bill for having three or more descendants. No income criteria were required of them, an issue that the Ministry for Ecological Transition will now introduce as an urgent requirement.
A total of 1,351,027 citizens, according to official government data, currently receive aid aimed at “compensating for thermal expenses” of the “most vulnerable” consumers for the use of heating and hot water or cooking. The vast majority of the beneficiaries are the lowest incomes. But among large families there has been a problem of “false positives” for years, that is, of people who can take advantage of the social bonus but who, due to their income level, would not need any financial help.
Specifically, 241,599 people belonging to large families benefit from the thermal social bonus. They are considered directly “vulnerable”, without having to prove their income level, and receive a direct discount on their bill. In this case is Ossorio. Another group of large families, 108,768 in total, have proven that they earn less than twice the Iprem (the indicator used to grant social assistance) and are considered “severely vulnerable”. There is a third group classified as “at risk of social exclusion”, made up of 1,147 households. In total, there are 351,514 large families that benefit from help to pay their bills.
These data indicate that, by not taking into account the income criteria for access to the thermal social bonus, a significant number of large families decided to request it, and it was granted, despite not specifically being in a situation considered to be of energy poverty. . They are almost 20% of the total.
Families benefiting from the social bonus have, therefore, grown remarkably in recent years: they now represent 28.2% of households receiving the aid, a skyrocketing figure since in 2019 they were less than 10%, according to the CNMC.
The thermal social bonus is also benefiting a considerable number of high incomes. The independent Fiscal Responsibility Authority (Airef) published a report in October in which it concluded that families with the greatest resources benefit from 3% of the total cost of aid (which has a budget of 227 million), which is aimed at the vulnerable. This situation is not new, but rather it has been taking place for years and also affects the electricity social bonus. It is enough to resort to the survey of family budgets prepared by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the panel of income-equity households of the Tax Agency to corroborate that since at least 2015 the families with the highest incomes have benefited from these bonuses.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IEE), under the Ministry of Finance, has been criticizing this situation since at least 2019. In a report from that year, the agency stated that including all families with three children or more, regardless of their income, as potential beneficiaries of the social bonus is “a regressive allocation criterion” since “many of the large families They are not vulnerable.” From Ecological Transition they are committed to approving the changes quickly.
The Government does take into account income criteria to grant the thermal social bonus to 885,313 people, always according to official data. The beneficiaries with a minimum pension are, for their part, 103,511; those who receive the minimum income amount to 5,416 and those who are unemployed are 1,958.
The social bonus is not the only public aid that has an unwanted effect. The Bank of Spain or the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (Fedea) have issued several reports since the implementation of the different aids to combat inflation, concluding that the highest incomes benefit in part from the measures. It happens with the reduction of VAT on food, electricity and gas. More significant is the fact that the bonus of 20 cents per liter of fuel or free public transport benefited and benefits even more families with greater economic resources.
