French service stations besieged by motorists anxious to benefit from the last hours of higher discounts, and sometimes completely dry. These scenes experienced in recent days are now over. This Wednesday, November 16, prices at the pump are again on the rise in France.
In question: the drastic reduction of the state discount which reached 30 cents per liter since September 1 and that of 20 cents granted by TotalEnergies in its service stations. Both have been reduced to 10 euro cents. These discounts of 10 cents will continue to be applied until December 31.
The government will continue to grant aid in 2023. In order to maintain the balance of public accounts, the executive has, however, been seeking to reduce the bill for several months. For next year, the government is counting instead on “targeted aid” for motorists “who are struggling to make ends meet”, indicated Monday on LCI Gabriel Attal.
Help “big rollers and big workers”
The Minister of Public Accounts gave some indications on the new system which will be implemented next year, even if “all this will be defined and clarified in the coming weeks”. The objective will be to help “the big rollers and the big workers”. The French “who use their car to go to work, who often have trouble making ends meet” will benefit from this new discount, he detailed on LCI.
Gabriel Attal, however, did not specify what precisely the “big rollers” are. Based on the device envisaged by the government last summer, the “big rollers” would be the French people living more than 30 kilometers from their place of work or who travel more than 12,000 kilometers per year as part of their work. .
Accession to the new mechanism will be “conditioned on several criteria”: “the fact of working”, “having a registration number” and “being in popular categories or middle classes”. Gabriel Attal also explained the procedure to follow in order to be able to benefit from this aid: “All you have to do is go to a website, enter your teledeclarant number, your car registration number. This will allow you to see if you are working, if you you are in the income levels that allow access to aid. Then, you will receive aid directly in your bank account, after a few days”, he detailed.
An envelope of more than 1.5 billion for the new device
“The award criteria and the amount of aid, which will be paid all at once, have not been decided”, however specified on Tuesday. with of the Parisian one close to the file. Joined by our colleagues, the entourage of the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, however, assures that the small riders “even if they only do 5 kilometers a day, can be helped. We can imagine a surcharge for the big ones wheelers, but all workers who need to take their car will be able to benefit from this boost.”
An envelope “around 1.5 or 1.6 billion euros” will be devoted to the new targeted device. The discount on fuel granted this year has meanwhile cost the state “more than 7 billion euros”, said Gabriel Attal.
During questions to the government on Tuesday, the minister recalled that the device allowed “an average saving of 120 euros for a motorist” to which “are added 40 euros for the discount of TotalEnergies for those who are supplied in stations of TotalEnergies”. “We have only one compass: continue to protect the French without letting our public accounts slip and therefore tomorrow’s taxes increase”, continued the Minister of Public Accounts.
Last week, diesel at the pump showed a national average price of 1.8319 euros per liter, while that of unleaded 95 gasoline reached 1.6797 euros and that of unleaded 95-E10 gasoline rose at 1.6222 euros, according to figures from the Ministry of Ecological Transition. In the midst of a period of inflation, French motorists will therefore have to put more of their hands into their wallets, especially drivers of diesel vehicles who risk having to pay more than 2 euros per liter for their fuel.