One in ten Belgians lives with a monthly income below the poverty line (i.e. 1293 euros net for a single person). Anti-poverty networks launch a cry of warning to the political world : whether in Flanders, Brussels or Wallonia, “it’s terrible on the ground, whether individually, in households, in associations, in nurseries, in places that welcome the homeless, it is absolutely necessary to put the turbo on the resolution of the economic problem energy (with even more ambitious immediate aid) but above all the fastest possible structural responses“, explains Christine Mahy, secretary general of the Walloon Network for the fight once morest poverty, interviewed this Tuesday on La Première.
“We need short-term aid for people, but it’s a bit of a bottomless pit because it’s money that goes to energy suppliers while we don’t solve the basic problem which is: what is the quality of housing in our country, how do we insulate, how do we get the energy out of the market? We must ask ourselves these questions from the European level to the regional and federal levels”.
On the ground, it also notes an impoverishment of the middle class, as well as people who have financial difficulties while benefiting from the social energy tariff. “For a very long time, incomes have been too low for a whole section of the population: it is not cyclical. In Belgium, our statistical tools do not allow us to act in real time: there are always unresolved structural problems which combine with a crisis difficulty presented as temporary (but on energy everyone doubts this character momentary)”.
