A source of savings known to all, often put forward as the obvious solution, but which until now had not been quantified. The cost of the “administrative millefeuille” linked to the skills shared by the State and the communities “can be estimated at 7.5 billion euros”, according to a report submitted this Wednesday April 29 to the government.
While the executive has already made 10 billion euros in cuts in state spending in 2024 and is seeking 10 billion additional savings, the costs of the tangle of skills “cannot all be eliminated but they can be reduced”, notes the government in a press release sent to AFP.
The figure of 7.5 billion euros communicated by Thomas Cazenave (Public accounts) and Dominique Faure (Local authorities) comes from a report commissioned at the end of 2023 from the mayor of Charleville-Mézières Boris Ravignon, and submitted this Wednesday to the government. In France there are “too many layers: you have State services, operators, agencies, four levels of communities, sometimes unions, mixed economy companies… What’s wrong is that on a public policy, there are four or five of us around the table”, lamented Thomas Cazenave at the launch of the mission.
Boris Ravignon’s report specifies that the cost of the “administrative millefeuille” mainly falls on communities (6 billion euros), with the State bearing a financial burden four times less (1.5 billion euros). In detail, the cost of the tangle of skills is estimated at 4.8 billion euros for the municipalities, 696 million euros for the intermunicipalities, 355 million euros for the departments and 117 million for the regions. “This evaluation remains an order of magnitude, and undoubtedly a minimum, it being understood that the operators” of the State (France Travail, National Housing Agency, etc.) were not included in the calculation, underlines the author of the report.
For a State “finally refocused and strategist”
To arrive at this figure, the mission surveyed more than 200 communities and prefectures by questionnaire, and identified three types of costs induced by the sharing of certain skills between administrations (multiplication of committees, coordination and processing of funding requests). The costs linked to coordination between different administrations which jointly exercise public policy represent alone 85% of the 7.5 billion euros. Among the skills whose sharing is the most expensive, the mission cites education (1.2 billion euros), town planning (819.5 million) and roads (566 million).
However, “France does not have a category of communities to eliminate, a stratum of elected officials to liquidate so that everything works out”, insists Boris Ravignon at the conclusion of his report. “The mission’s most keen wish is that the reflection continues, to examine all the responsibilities that our State, finally refocused and strategic, could delegate with confidence to French communities,” he continues.
For a “standards simplification project”
The mayor of Charleville-Mézières also pleads for a “project to simplify standards”, another hobbyhorse of the government in recent months in addition to controlling public spending. Among the avenues to be explored, Boris Ravignon suggests simplifying the management of human resources in communities, or even reviewing the rules and organization of public procurement to make it “more effective and more efficient”.
According to Thomas Cazenave, quoted in the government press release, this report is a “contribution to the more global reflection desired by the President of the Republic” around decentralization, a theme on which another mission was entrusted to the majority deputy Eric Woerth. The Ravignon report “will feed future consultation with associations of elected officials”, adds the Minister of Public Accounts.