A few days after the approval in the Senate of the Calderoli bill on differential autonomy, it now appears clear that an important role in ensuring that inequalities of rights between citizens do not occur will be played by the definition of the essential levels of Lep benefits whose iter definition should be completed within a year.
«Strange that the new law takes more time to define them, after they have been studied, spent, deferred, using the term “Lep” as a non-questionable totem», he says Tiziano Vecchiatopresident of Zancan Foundation of Padua.
Don’t you think, President, that the Lep will be able to guarantee a substantial renewal of welfare responses?
We were not born today, we have been talking about Lep, Lea, Liveas and Leps for more than twenty years. Lep is a means, it should not be confused with the end. Distributional equity cannot be linked to a performance cost. Those who believed in it did not ask themselves: why limit ourselves to standardizing the input (its cost) without understanding how to fairly govern the output (the responses) and above all how to guarantee fairness of outcomes, i.e. effective solutions for people? The obstinacy of those who confuse performance with solutions has prevailed and continues to do so, without asking themselves who will pay the social costs of performanceism and inconclusive research.
But then what could be the critical issues of autonomy for the health, social and healthcare sectors?
They concern the growing inequalities between North and South but also within the same regions, with differentials that often reproduce the minimums in the South and the maximums in the North. It is therefore a question of regional systems and within each region. Will differentiated autonomy be enough to address problems that are evident to those dealing with health, social and socio-health welfare responses? The current territorial capacity differentials are on a collision course with the constitutional foundation of the “single and indivisible Republic” (art. 5), i.e. called to protect the balance between the rights and duties of every person in every territory. For this reason the Constitution “recognizes and promotes local autonomies; implements the widest administrative decentralization in services that depend on the State; adapts the principles and methods of its legislation to the needs of autonomy and decentralization” (art. 5). But if we look at social assistance, the local authorities have not been able or willing to create Social Territorial Areas – ATS, going from almost 8 thousand municipal managements spread across the territories to around 600 managements aggregated under the ATS regime in the country. If we look at healthcare, the regional welfare systems resemble the old mutual one that 833/78 had superseded. The result is, in fact, healthcare based on georeferenced rights, with variable phasing, based on people’s residence.
So do you see a risk of increasing the gaps between the regions?
More than a risk, it is already in the facts and in the welfare recession we are experiencing. It calls into question the systems of trust necessary for social and democratic life. This is a drift that exposes our country to considerable difficulties. For “differentiated” autonomy, a law is not enough without a departure from the Constitution, which had imagined a country capable of addressing problems in the territories with a spirit of loyal institutional collaboration, enhancing subsidiarity (art. 118). This perspective is not new, Presidential Decree 616/77 on administrative decentralization already invited investments in this direction with social services. After decades, the judgment is not encouraging because the results are losing. Who would trust someone who hasn’t been able to do what they are now asking to do? I’ll leave the answer to the reader.
Are guarantees needed?
The problem of guarantees is not of today. More than thirty years ago we felt the need to include the figure of “Guarantors” in our legal system, for example for the protection of minors necessary to prevent and report institutional malfunctions which can become real institutional mistreatment. The same was done by introducing forms of “independent authorities” to guarantee competition, information, credit and other fundamental balances for the proper functioning of a democratic state. The independent authorities were entrusted with “preventive and subsequent” responsibilities. Guarantees are needed to prevent presumptuous choices of any inadequate applicants and to sanction the “differentiated self-employed” who have not delivered the promised results. It is reasonable to think that those who ask for more autonomy will agree to undergo “preventive stress tests of ability”, so as not to fail the first exam. It will have to accept that the “social patronage” of citizens is reassured within the constitutional rules. The electoral clients should not be confused with the social ones, destined to receive the promised answers. The electoral one is willing to share impossible dreams, while the social one knows, however, the daily impossibility of obtaining responses necessary by need and by right financed by fiscal solidarity.
What can be done, then, to counteract the risks?
75 years after the Constitution, we have learned that the goals shared by the founding fathers are not words but facts to be achieved and citizenship infrastructures to be built to guarantee responses of significant social interest. This rule applies to every institutional level. For example, if the central level fails to guarantee the right to mobility by not giving a passport to those who need it, it can entrust this task to those who are more capable of doing it quickly and well. It is therefore not a question of the height of the institutional level. The Constitution (articles 2 and 3) is convinced of this, because it believes in the need to protect social clients starting from the weakest. The Zancan Foundation has titled its 2023 report on the fight against poverty and inequality A constituent for a new welfare: it is not an invitation to change the Constitution but to implement it today, learning from the mistakes and critical issues we are experiencing. Furthermore, the law on differentiated autonomy cannot be used as a retaliation against the higher level but to better consolidate solidarity between institutional levels.
How then can we define the prospect of differentiated autonomy today?
Starting from what shouldn’t be. It can’t be a selfie
political and institutional” to obtain electoral advantages. In the work of the “welfare constitution” proposed by the Zancan Foundation, the rereading of the Constitution helps jurists, economists and welfare experts to tell each other the truth, to call things by their name, to find the right balance in a capable institutional system to manage political ownership and management responsibilities for the benefit of people and communities. It is a necessary effort with preventive and independent checks of capacity, that is, credible, reminding us that at the time of the Constitution, sociality was imagined as a dual composition, between public and private. Over the last forty years, the picture has been enriched by the perspective of the private social sector, which puts general interests before private ones. Now is the time to invest in the potential of the “social public”, i.e. an institutional system composed of political public, social public, private social, private entrepreneurial, discovering that only together will they be able to share truthful balance sheets of sociality and inclusive justice.