Almost 242,000 people who receive the social thermal bonus have not proven income problems and, therefore, the Administration has had no way of knowing if they are vulnerable. These 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 Més Madrid, Mónica García, who requested aid to lower their energy bill for having three or more descendants. They were not required to meet any income criteria, an issue that the Ministry for the Ecological Transition will now introduce as a requirement with an urgent nature.
A total of 1,351,027 citizens, according to official Government data, currently receive aid aimed at “compensating the thermal costs” of the “most vulnerable” consumers for the use of heating and hot water or cooking . The vast majority of 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 welfare but who, due to their level of income, would not need any financial aid.
Specifically, 241,599 people belonging to large families benefit from the social thermal voucher. They are directly considered “vulnerable”, without having to prove their income level, and receive a direct discount on the bill. This is the case of Ossorio. Another group of large families, 108,768 in total, have proven that they receive less than twice the Iprem (the indicator used to award social benefits) and are considered “severely vulnerable”. There is a third group, which is cataloged 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 the bills.
These data indicate that, since the income criterion for access to the thermal social voucher is not taken into account, a significant number of large families decided to apply for it, and were granted it, despite the fact that are not specifically in a situation considered to be energy poor. They are already almost 20% of the total.
The families benefiting from the social bonus have, therefore, been growing significantly in recent years: they now represent 28.2% of the households receiving the aid, a figure that has skyrocketed because in 2019 they were less than 10%, according to the CNMC.
The thermal social bonus also benefits a considerable number of high earners. The Independent Fiscal Responsibility Authority (Airef) published a report in October in which it concludes that families with more resources benefit from 3% of the total cost of the aid (which has a budget of 227 million) , which is aimed at the vulnerable.
This situation is not new, but has been happening for years and also affects other benefits such as the electric social voucher. It is enough to turn to the survey of family budgets prepared by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the income-asset household panel of the Tax Agency to corroborate that since at least 2015 families with higher incomes benefit from these bonds.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IEE), dependent on the Ministry of Finance, has been criticizing this situation since at least 2019. In a report from that year, the organization 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 large families are not vulnerable”. Transició Ecològica 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. There are, for their part, 103,511 beneficiaries with a minimum pension; those who receive the minimum income amount to 5,416 and those who are unemployed are 1,958.
Social welfare is not the only public aid that has an unintended effect. The Bank of Spain or the Fundación d’Estudis d’Economia Aplicada (Fedea) have issued several reports since the launch of the different aids to combat inflation in which they conclude that higher incomes benefit from the measures .
It also happens in the case of the reduction of VAT on food, electricity and gas. And even more significant is the case of the bonus of 20 cents per liter of fuel or free public transport, which according to these studies benefited and benefits even to a greater extent families with more financial resources than the poorest families.
