The Government to redistribute welfare as needed

• Well-off families could lose the state aid for children or newborns

The Government will draw up a Social Security Code, by which only poor citizens would qualify for receiving support from the state.

The monthly allowance and the clothes for newborns, the financial aid upon the creation of the new family or the subsidies for home heating, are just some of the welfare measures that citizens which fit into the "well-off" bracket will no longer benefit from.

This unpopular measure by the Boc government is based by two arguments: the unfairness of providing welfare to families that don"t really need it and the strain that it puts on the budget.

The members of the government consider it abnormal that there are families with a precarious financial state that don"t receive welfare, while other families whose income is above the average, also receive state aid. The state support for low income families will increase. One such example is the increase of the state aid for buying clothes for newborns from 150 lei to 200 lei.

With the crisis in full swing, after trying to reform the public pension system, as well as cutting wages in the public sector, the government is now tackling the issue of reducing welfare spending.

Last year alone, the state spent over EUR 1 billion on various types of welfare payments to over 4 million people.

• ANPS: We will provide welfare for poor citizens

The Chairman of the National Agency for Social Services (ANPS), Viorel Alexandru said for BURSA that, amid the crisis and the limited budget resources, the reform of the welfare system is a must.

Mr. Alexandru said: "We submitted the data for 2009 with the welfare we disbursed last year to the Ministry of Labor, and the process for drawing up the Welfare Code has already begun. Under the current circumstances of crisis, we intend to allocate the resources of the budget for families and citizens which are facing troubles, in order to help improve their standard of living. We need this reform of the welfare system in order to eliminate social inequity and to spend public resources more efficiently".

Viorel Alexandru said that the Government will review all the welfare paid so far, as well as the number of people that benefited from this measures. "Following this review, the Welfare Code will be similar to the Tax Code, as it will include all the afferent legislation", the chairman of the ANPS.

Concerning the children"s allowance, Viorel Alexandru said: "Even though this a benefit for children and not for their families, we may decide to no longer pay it out to well-off families".

• Boc: "Paying welfare indiscriminately means putting unneeded strain on the public budget"

The need to reform the system and the need to draw up a Welfare Code was suggested by the Romanian Presidential Commission for the Analysis of Social and Demographic Risks in Romania.

In a televised broadcast, prime-minister Emil Boc said that, after the new Law on pensions, the next major issue that the government will focus on will be the drafting of a new Welfare Code.

"The Welfare Code will bring order to the welfare system and eliminate its abuse", the PM said.

The PM said that there are cases where "some families have a Mercedes in the back yard, but they get paid welfare, or cases where people receive support for heating their homes, while their income is big enough to make it unjustifiable for them to collect that money". "Paying welfare indiscriminately means putting unneeded strain on the public budget", the PM concluded.