Universal national service: the untraceable generalization – Senate

2023-03-09 23:00:00

The summary

Four years following the start of the universal national service experiment, Éric Jeansannetas, special rapporteur for the “Sport, youth and community life” mission, presented the conclusions of his budgetary audit on the universal national service (SNU ).

Feedback on the quality of the cohesion stay is positive: 9 out of 10 young people are satisfied. At the same time, the experiment revealed the major obstacles that stand in the way of the project to generalize universal national service.

On the supervision of young people, the generalization of the SNU would require recruiting between 15,000 and 50,000 supervisors depending on the scenario chosen. This would imply creating a genuine universal national service “sector”, which would take several years to be operational.

In terms of accommodation, there are not enough boarding places in schools to accommodate young people, and holiday centers of sufficient size to accommodate a group stay are rare. While the objective is 200 young people per centre, the centers capable of accommodating minors have an average of 96 places. The difficulty of finding accommodation sites, already strongly noted during the experiment, risks leading to significant additional costs.

Finally, the logistics required to accommodate an entire age group (840,000 young people) is out of all proportion to the dimensions of the experiment (32,400 young people in 2022), which would require the creation of a real administration of universal national service. The cost per year of generalized UNS would probably be more than 2 billion euros.

In view of these elements, the rapporteur recommends suspending the project to generalize the cohesion stay, in order to remove the uncertainties that remain on this project. It also reaffirms the need for Parliament to be able to decide on universal national service.

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