After a year 2022 marked by unprecedented congestion in the services for issuing passports and identity cards, demand remains particularly strong in the authorized town halls. Count on average 66 days to get an appointment and a month and a half to receive your finalized identity document. The government, which is not unaware of the discontent of citizens on this subject, recently announced several measures to try to shorten waiting times. One of the solutions consists in encouraging the municipalities to redouble their efforts by signing an “emergency securities contract”: the town halls undertake to increase by at least 20% the requests processed in May and in June, while the State grants them an additional financial allocation of 4,000 euros per biometric station.
This is precisely what the Loroux-Bottereau (Loire-Atlantique), town of 8,500 inhabitants to the east of Nantes. No coincidence. The waiting time to get an appointment in this “extremely busy” territory reached nearly six months there last year and it still stands at 120 days, more than the departmental average (100 days). “We worked with the team to see if we could respond to the distress of the applicants by modifying the hours of attendance and working overtime. The response was positive. I think we have the spirit of public service, ”explains the mayor, Emmanuel Rivery.
“People are stressed, sometimes aggressive”
Concretely, appointments have now been added between noon and 2 p.m. on weekdays, as well as on Saturday mornings. Enough to increase production by 30% and open 150 additional slots over two months. “They were quickly taken by storm,” says Emmanuel Rivery, who confides that, without state funding, it would not have been possible to mobilize additional staff. “It is urgent to be able to give titles to the French, in particular before the summer period. There are the departures on vacation, which are currently being prepared, but also the administrative procedures, the exams… It is very important, ”insists Pascal Otheguy, secretary general of the Loire-Atlantique prefecture.
The State, which recommends that applicants for pre-fill their files online in order to “save time during appointments”, also recalls that a digital platform shared between municipalities was put in place in November in order to “avoid multiple appointments” and the cancellations that followed. The staff of the regional training centers has also been increased to “be able to absorb the wave of requests”.
What hope to descend this summer to 30 days of patience to obtain an appointment as claimed by Elisabeth Borne? “People are stressed by the wait, sometimes aggressive, testifies Cécile, municipal officer in charge of identity documents at Loroux-Bottereau. The other day a gentleman exploded saying that I was going to “fuck up his vacation”. Fortunately, national communication on this subject has made it possible to calm the situation, I find. It’s more accepted now. »