corona pandemic
Air filter: states call only 22 percent of the federal funds
An air filter is pushed into a classroom at the IGS Lehrte integrated comprehensive school. Millions of euros in subsidies for air filters were not called up by the federal states. photo
© Julian Stratenschulte/dpa
For better corona protection: The federal government has made 200 million euros available to the federal states to equip schools and daycare centers with mobile air purifiers. Nowhere have the funds been fully utilised.
The federal states have used less than a quarter of the federal funds for mobile air purifiers in schools and daycare centers. This emerges from a balance sheet at the end of the funding, which the Federal Ministry of Economics sent to the German Press Agency on request.
According to this, the federal states had used almost 43.2 million of the available funds of 200 million euros by August 11 of this year. This corresponds to almost 22 percent. The specialist service “Table Media” had previously reported on the number of calls – albeit at an earlier date.
According to the ministry, the figures that are now available to dpa are the final balance of payments. Others are not planned because the funding program for mobile air filters expired on July 31 of this year. According to the information, no extension of the program is planned.
Hamburg is the leader
The states of Hamburg (more than 87 percent), Thuringia (almost 76 percent) and Bremen (almost 58 percent) received the most federal funds for mobile air filters, measured by the maximum possible payments for the respective federal state. In contrast, the support was particularly poor in Saxony (almost 6.5 percent) and Rhineland-Palatinate (five percent). Saarland takes last place among the federal states with just under 3.9 percent of the possible payment amount. There, only around 95,000 euros of the maximum possible funding of almost 2.4 million euros was claimed.
The funding program for the mobile air purifiers was launched on August 20 last year. The federal government has made an offer to the states to support them in equipping schools and daycare centers with air purifiers, the ministry said. The program is “one of many building blocks to promote suitable protection against infection in schools and daycare centers,” it said. Some states had already set up their own funding programs for this and therefore not or only partially exhausted the federal funds. The state funding programs had started much earlier – in 2020.
Still no nationwide equipment in Germany
The debate about air filters picked up speed again in some federal states when school started recently. For example, the federal chairman of the Association for Education and Training, Udo Beckmann, recently complained that there is still no nationwide equipment with air purifiers in Germany.
In addition to mobile air cleaners, air filters that are used in stationary, i.e. already installed, ventilation systems can also be used to protect against infection in schools. According to estimates by the Federal Environment Agency, around ten percent of schools are currently equipped with permanently installed ventilation systems. Mobile cleaners would therefore not be necessary there.
With regard to federal funding for stationary air filters, the ministry announced that this – unlike the funding for mobile ones – was largely tied. Here, 1.37 billion euros of a total of 1.4 billion euros are already firmly planned in the federal states. To date, only 24 million euros have been paid out.