Skipping meals or going into debt – that's the difficult choice facing hundreds of thousands of people in France daily, according to the latest annual report by French charity Secours Catholique.
Nearly half of the households that sought help from Secours Catholique in France in 2021 don't have the money to feed themselves on a daily basis, the Catholic charity warned in its annual report on poverty published on Thursday.
"These people do not live, they survive, they are constantly calculating," Véronique Devise, president of Secours Catholique told AFP.
People helped by the French charity earned an average of €548 per month in 2021, well below the poverty line, which is set at around €1,100 per month for a single person.
Less than €5 a day
Expenses such as rent, electricity bills and insurance represent nearly 60 percent of the income of these households, according to the report.
Taking into account other expenses such as the repayment of debts or transport costs, 48 percent of households helped by Secours Catholique have a living allowance of less than €5 per day per person.
For Devise, this situation "is not acceptable" and "the government must absolutely take up this issue of the poorest 10 percent of society".
Secours Catholique is also concerned about the effects of inflation, which rose to a record 6.2 percent in France over one year in October.
"These families are already doing a lot to reduce their electricity and gas consumption, what are they going to do in the face of the 15 percent price increase planned for next year?" asks Devise.
"The winter period is the one I dread the most," one person who approached Secours Catholique said. "Sometimes you end up not heating the apartment at all or heating just one room."
Price caps
The Abbé Pierre Foundation on Thursday called on the state to strengthen caps on energy price increases to help the poorest households to cope.
From January 1 2023, the cap will limit the rise in power prices to 15 percent. This increase is higher than that provided for by the previous measure, which has limited hikes to 4 percent since October 2021.
"If you have €5,000, 15 percent is manageable, even if it's a lot. But for the poorest households, 15 percent is impossible," Christophe Robert, director of the Foundation, told a press conference.
"It is imperative to help the most vulnerable households more and to do it very quickly," he insisted.
Secours Catholique provided assistance to 938,000 people in France in 2021, the chairty says, with single mothers representing a quarter of them.
The number of foreigners receiving aid from the group stood at 50 percent last year, a phenomenon on the rise over the past ten years.
