Frequently Asked Questions
Question: What benefits does the low income package provide?
Reply: The first National Family Plan has been adopted: for the first time in Italy, families now have an instrument providing standard guidelines regarding family policies, giving the family a central place and social citizenship through a medium-term strategy ranging beyond the rationale of adopting piecemeal and fragmentary measures as has been the case in the past.
The importance of an articulated Plan of measures to support the family is more evident today than ever before: following the economic and financial crisis –which since 2008 has become a global crisis – families are being asked more than ever before to perform the function of providing support for the weakest sections of society: children, the elderly and the disabled.
Against this background, and while respecting and enhancing the powers of different tiers – central, regional and sub-regional – of government within the present constitutional system, the Plan established measures which view the family as a social partner in which to invest for the future of the country by exploiting its social cohesion functions and ensuring inter-generational equity.
These are important indications of general guidance to guarantee conditions to enable families and their individual members to enjoy their rights and to be able to use the services that exist throughout the country by systematically organising and networking public powers and responsibilities at every tier of government, and those of private stakeholders.
All this will be implemented in a way which will not replace, but support and enhance the autonomous functions of the family, using the family’s capacity for social and economic enterprise rather than viewing the family merely in terms of assistance and welfare, as has been the case hitherto.
More specifically, the principles underlying the measures are:
- Economic equity: and particular, the revision of the ISEE;
- Housing policies for families;
- Family care: services for infants, leave, care times and measures for the disabled and non-self-reliant;
- Equal opportunities, and reconciling family and employment duties;
- The private social sector, the third sector and the network of family associations;
- Counselling and information services (councillors, family mediators, family centres);
- Immigration (to support immigrant families);
- Local family alliances;
- Monitoring family policies.
In particular:
What is the ISEE, and why change it?
The ISEE (equivalent economic situation indicator) is the system used to assess the economic conditions giving eligibility to access social benefits. The rigid character of the present assessment system creates the risk of unfairness because it does not take account of such situations as large families, or families with disabled or non-self-reliant members.
Housing policy has a considerable influence on starting new families, and their development. What does the government intend to do in this regard?
In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, housing policy has a significant effect on the development of new families. To facilitate access to a first home for new families – thereby helping young people to start their family – the National Plan proposes a series of measures:
- Facilities regarding urbanisation charges and area costs for builders, setting aside a proportion of homes for rent or future sale for the benefit of young couples;
- Measures regarding rentals – which are often prohibitively high – by supporting actions to build affordable housing;
- Subsidised mortgage loans for young couples to buy their first home;
- Giving priority to issuing building licences to assist young couples.
Family care: what will the government do to improve the condition of families?
Population ageing and the increase in the number of women workers have increased the demand for care-workers (work which used to be performed by women who looked after the weaker members of their families, such as children, or the elderly who were unable to look after themselves), but who are becoming increasingly rare. While needs are rising, the number of women available, and who are ready, willing and able to become care-takers is declining.
Furthermore, the fact that education and training now last longer, and that people join the labour market and become established in professional life at a higher age than before, is leading increasingly more women and couples to put off having children, which requires not only financial investment, but also also heavy investment in terms of time.
Considering this, the Plan provides that care-taking, as a crucial and increasingly more necessary resource, is to become a political objective to be pursued in terms of protecting, incentivising, enhancing and strengthening the family, by encouraging the sharing of care work between mothers and fathers as an element of equal opportunities and practical and cultural sustainability.
The Plan provides for measures in the following sectors:
1. Services for infants
It is intended to foster a culture to enhance the value of motherhood and fatherhood, through specific measures of a high personal and social value. In particular, the plan provides for the following:
- Supporting expectant mothers in difficulty, and single mothers;
- Improving the network of social-educational services for infants. It is necessary to increase the number of kindergartens considering the delay with which Italy has adjusted the public offering of kindergartens to the increasing demand; despite the gradual increase in the availability of public kindergartens, the actual demand being satisfied is still very small compared with the potential demand: the number of users of kindergartens has risen from 9.0% of residents aged from zero to two years of age in the school year 2003/2004 to 11.8% in 2010/2011. This objective must be pursued by encouraging the development of an integrated, wide-ranging, high-quality and differentiated network covering the whole country, providing services to foster the well-being and development of children, to support the educational role of parents, and to reconcile the work time and care-taking time. The government intends to increase the offering of services in order to enable families to choose the most appropriate solutions to meet their needs in terms of flexible working hours, registration procedures and attendance.
2. Support for families with teenage children (12 to 16 years) and preadolescent children (6 to 11 years)
We are familiar with the difficulties which the adult generation face with regard to effectively handing on values and patterns for interpreting reality, able to provide preadolescents, teenagers and young people with essential tools for acquiring knowledge. Hence the importance of supporting parental responsibility for the education of their children in a society which is becoming increasingly more complex and which is transmitting values that are contradictory and ambiguous. The Plan has therefore identified the need to:
- Define an educational Pact between the school and the family in order to explain to share educational expectations and benchmark values in respect of which to show mutual responsibilities in an attitude of exchange and dialogue;
- Develop specific services for parents, implementing the services and opportunities for exchange and dialogue, mindful of the crucial character of certain developmental phases.
3. Care-giving times
The question of the time devoted to providing care is at the heart of a series of new family policy measures. The Plan envisages measures relating to the following:
- Increasing the period of maternity leave;
- Extending the period of leave in the case of premature births;
- Strengthening the maternity leave period for self-employed and semi-self-employed women workers;
- Providing maternity allowances to self-employed working fathers (biological and adoptive);
- Increasing the allowance (today set at 30% of the salary) during the parental leave period (that is to say, the optional right given tor Co-workers to take leave from work for each child);
- Raising the age threshold of the child from 8 to 18 years to enable parents to take parental leave, thereby enabling them to care for their teenage children whenever necessary;
- The mandatory priority of granting part-time work to parents with underage children;
- The possibility for not only parents but also grandparents to take parental leave;
- Making parental leave and family care leave flexible.
4. Care work for families with disabled and non-self-reliant elderly members
Pursuing family policies for families with disabled and non-self-reliant elderly members entails designing and implementing measures and services to:
- Support the nature of the family when responding to the needs of the disabled and the elderly (subsidiarity);
- Focusing activities on the family as part of the local community (community care);
- Adopt social governance strategies, that is to say, encourage forms of self-management of association networks able to act as valid interlocutors of the local administrative and economic institutions.
From a subsidiary point of view, these general objectives are tailored differently depending upon whether the focus is on the person with a disability or a lone elderly person, their family unit, their extended networks (neighbours, friends, volunteers), and steer the organisation of a range of personal services/activities for the non-self-reliant.
How will the government act with regard to counselling services (cousellors, family mediation services, family centres), and why?
Counsellors were introduced in 1975 under law 405 to counsel and advise families and provide parental education, mainly for the health of the woman and the couple. Today it has become necessary to expand the offering of counselling services providing support for couples in terms of their relationship and parenting activities in different phases in the life-cycle.
The main thrusts of the measures are:
- Close integration of the psychological, educational, social and health care aspects;
- Designing, managing and assessing the contents, objectives and results of the service closely linked to civil society: families, and family networks and associations;
- Promoting the well-being of the family as a whole (and not only one particular member, such as a woman, viewed outside her relational environment);
- Greater subsidiarity;
- The continuing training of the counsellors and enabling them to constantly discuss with the family networks in the local area.
Family counsellors can find a natural complement of their work in the Family Centre, which is a physical place which is open to, and receptive to the local territory, managed and planned with the family associations network, to make it truly able to identify the various needs linked to changes in family life, the difficulties of reconciling working commitments and hours, with caring, the need to support young couples, single parent families, immigrant families, and parents in difficulty.
Page published on 19/07/2012
