Wheelchairs reimbursed at 100%, accessible stations… President Emmanuel Macron announced on Wednesday a series of measures to improve the lives of people with disabilities, including an envelope of one and a half billion euros to make more accessible public places.
Regarding disability, “we are not up to the ideal of equality that we have engraved on the pediment of the Republic”, he launched during the 6th National Conference on Disability (CNH), taking note of a severe opinion from the Council of Europe.
The European Committee of Social Rights (CEDS), a body of the Council, criticized France in mid-April for not effectively remedying the problems linked to the inclusion of children and adolescents with disabilities in schools as well as the difficulties of people with disabilities. to access health services.
“Real Programming”
First urgent and priority project set by the Head of State: accelerate the compliance of small businesses, restaurants, public services, transport, in order to improve accessibility, which remains largely insufficient. “This project is far from being a discovery, we’ve been making commitments for 20 years, it’s the one that prevents your lives so and so much, access to housing, sometimes to a job and to merits the most fundamental rights,” he conceded.
The state will put 1.5 billion euros on the table for this, he said, promising a “real programming” of measures to be implemented from the summer. The Head of State also announced that this commitment would be subject to regular monitoring, with an initial assessment from 2024. But he did not immediately retain the idea of sanctions demanded by the associations for establishments slow to act. “We must already put the means, try to accelerate,” he said.
School, university, access to employment, disability allowance, disabled sports, love life… the president reviewed all the areas in which measures were to be taken. To enable diagnosis as early as possible, all children will henceforth have access before they are six years old, by 2025 at the latest, to a public disability identification and assessment service. People with disabilities must have access to all types of employment regardless of their situation, he also insisted. Pôle emploi and France Travail “will now be the gateway and will help to develop a professional project and to determine the environment they will need”, he specified.
The presidential announcements were greeted with reserve by associations, some of which had decided to boycott the meeting by denouncing a lack of ambition. “Many declarations of intent and not many new measures”, judged Arnaud de Broca, president of the Collectif Handicaps, which brings together 52 associations, deploring in particular the absence of sanctions on accessibility.