Wheelchairs reimbursed at 100%, better accessibility, increased aid for supporting people with disabilities… Speaking at the sixth national disability conference, Emmanuel Macron detailed, Wednesday, April 26, several measures aimed at improving the lives of disabled people. People with Disabilities.
The President of the Republic announced in particular that the State would devote 1.5 billion euros to improving accessibility to public places for people with disabilities. “It’s a heavy budget line”, he noted, adding that this commitment would be “declined before the summer” and will be the subject of “programming”. This aid will concern “particularly small establishments open to the public (…) small shops, restaurants, community halls, public service premises”. The Head of State also announced that this commitment would be subject to regular monitoring, with an initial assessment from 2024, and could then give rise to “sanctions” for public places improving their access too slowly.
The Head of State also announced that “wheelchairs will be fully reimbursed, starting in 2024”. “It’s an important measure, a social justice measure,” Macron said.
The project presented by the Head of State revolves around five axes:
“Changing People’s Daily Lives”
“Our goal is to propose a paradigm shift that meets the expectations of people with disabilities,” assured the minister in charge of the file, Geneviève Darrieussecq, opening the conference at the Elysée. Before the Head of State’s speech, several ministers had outlined the announcements to come. It is a question of “changing the daily life of the people” concerned, to allow them to “go to school, work, circulate”, to “be able to practice sports and cultural activities, to be able to live fully”, thus underlined the Minister of Solidarity, Jean-Christophe Combe. “The means will be put on accessibility. The school will change, transport, housing, France Travail will facilitate professional careers, ”he further listed.
The school for its part must be “sustainably transformed” to accommodate “all students”, which must go through a “differentiated pedagogy that will benefit everyone”, said his education colleague, Pap Ndiaye.
In total, 27 members of the government, including the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, as well as elected officials, representatives of local authorities, administrations, associations, companies and unions are gathered for this meeting organized every three years, supposed to set the course. public disability policies.
Before the opening of the conference, Emmanuel Macron’s entourage had promised “strong announcements”, with “immediate involvement over the next three years” in the lives of the 12 million French people affected by disability and 8 million of helpers. An envelope of 400 million euros should thus make it possible by 2027 to make the “158 national priority stations” accessible for all disabilities, motor and sensory, said Ms. Darrieussecq in Le Figaro. Only half are accessible today.
To improve the reception of children with disabilities in mainstream schools, establishments will be able to experiment with partnerships with “mobile teams of specialized educators, speech therapists, psychomotor therapists”, she added. At the start of the 2022 school year, 430,000 students with disabilities were enrolled in ordinary schools, a third more than in 2017. But establishments often struggle to provide them with good support and nearly one in ten remain out of school.
Boycott of certain associations
Despite everything, the Collectif Handicaps, which brings together 52 associations, had announced the day before that it would boycott the conference, because it accuses the executive of an “apparent lack of ambition”, a “lack of consultation”, and it does not has not obtained the right to directly challenge the head of state, explained its president Arnaud de Broca. The Elysée replied that the event was prepared for six months, over forty meetings, with 500 speakers. Some members of the collective, such as APF France Handicap (Motor disabilities) or Fnath (casualties), will however participate in round tables, specifies the Collective.
The associations are calling for “a proactive policy with multi-year budget programming”, to guarantee “effective access for people with disabilities to their rights”, explains the coordinator of the collective, Stéphane Lenoir. For him, this CNH must be an opportunity to correct the shortcomings highlighted by the Council of Europe, in a report published in mid-April: the international organization – distinct from the EU -, reproached France not to work effectively for the inclusion of children and adolescents with disabilities in schools and underlined access to health services for some people with disabilities to access health services.
APF France Handicap has launched a week of mobilization to “question” the public authorities: only half of establishments open to the public (ERP) are engaged in an accessibility process. The problem will be crucial during the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris next year, alert APF, which denounces the lack of adapted hotels, and underlines that only 3% of the 309 Paris metro stations are accessible to people with disabilities.