Citizens' money comes from January 1st: Heil: "One of the biggest social reforms in 20 years"

At the beginning of next year, citizen income is to replace the Hartz IV system. Federal Minister of Labor Heil assures that he wants to permanently free people from their social hardship and put a special focus on the option of further training. The opposition criticized the project as a “missed opportunity”.

Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil has promised reliable social security for people in need through the new citizens’ allowance. “The introduction of citizen’s income on January 1 will be one of the biggest social reforms in 20 years,” said Heil at the first consultation on the draft law in the Bundestag. “We want to reliably protect people who are in existential need.”

Heil went on to say that the citizen’s allowance should also ensure that those affected get out of trouble permanently. The traffic light coalition wants to use the citizens’ income to replace the Hartz IV system in its current form for the more than five million affected people on January 1 next year. “It’s good that we’re finally overcoming Hartz IV,” said Green labor market politician Beate Müller-Gemmeke.

Heil said that when the Hartz laws were introduced, there was mass unemployment. Today there is a shortage of skilled workers in Germany. However, two thirds of the long-term unemployed have not completed vocational training. So far, they have been kept afloat with unskilled work and then often slipped back into unemployment. “We want to give people the opportunity to catch up on a professional qualification,” says Heil.

The opposition accused the government of wrong approaches. CSU labor market expert Stephan Stracke called the reform “a missed opportunity”. “The citizen money goes completely in the wrong direction.” It challenges and encourages people too little. AfD MP Gerrit Huy said: “It’s nothing more than a softened Hartz IV – and that didn’t work.”

Citizens’ income is the central socio-political promise of the traffic light coalition. It had been planned before the war in Ukraine. With the agreement on the third relief package at the beginning of September, the SPD, Greens and FDP also decided that the standard rates for basic security should increase by 50 euros. The agenda for the plenary session also included the first deliberations on the planned housing benefit reform and the flat-rate energy price for pensioners.