This Saturday evening, Matthieu proudly arrives at his “Crêpe party”, a packet of flour and eggs under his arm. “Ah you won’t guess what guys. At Franprix, my restaurant ticket card was used to pay for all of that.” Except that Matthieu may soon no longer have the right to use this precious sesame to pay for his food shopping.
This Thursday, the extension into 2024 of the possibility of paying for all food shopping with meal vouchers, promised by the government, will be examined Thursday by the National Assembly, announced the president of the lower house Yaël Braun-Pivet on Sunday. The bill from the groups of the presidential majority (Renaissance, MoDem, Horizons) will be examined “Tuesday in committee and Thursday in public session”, affirmed Yaël Braun-Pivet on France 3.
“We are moving very quickly so that if Parliament decides to vote for this exemption, it can apply from January 1. I am very confident because there is the same bill tabled by the Republicans in the Senate so I think we will find a majority,” she added.
” Nothing will change “
The text proposes to extend until the end of 2024 the extension of the use of meal vouchers to all food products, even if they are not directly consumable without cooking or preparation (flour, pasta, rice, eggs, fish , meat, etc.). This exemption, in place since August 2022, was to end on December 31, 2023.
With the deadline approaching, parliamentarians and users had sounded the alarm in recent days and the government had then announced that “nothing will change” in 2024. The usage ceiling of 25 euros per day will also remain unchanged, had specified the Minister for Commerce Olivia Grégoire. The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire even said he was “ready for us to open the discussion” to perpetuate this system beyond 2024, to the great dismay of restaurateurs.
The bill examined Thursday nevertheless only aims to extend the system until December 31, 2024. The Senate has scheduled the examination of a similar bill on December 12, at the initiative of the LR group.
Born at the end of the 1960s in France, meal vouchers are used today by more than five million employees to pay for meals or food services at some 234,000 merchants.